Kahn, Lily; Yampolskaya, Sonya; Szendroi, Kriszta; (2024) YIDDISH WRITING SYSTEM. In: Meletis, D and Evertz-Rittich, M and Treiman, R, (eds.) Handbook of Germanic Writing Systems. De Gruyter: Berlin. (In press).

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Abstract

The chapter presents a survey of the Yiddish writing system as it has evolved over the past thousand years, from the earliest available sources dating to the 11th century until today. It begins with an overview of the Hebrew script, which was also used by Jews up until the 20th centuries for the numerous languages that they adopted in the Diaspora, e.g. Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Persian, Ladino, Yiddish (much in the same way that the Latin script has been used for a plethora of languages in Christian Europe and beyond. The chapter then examines the unique features of Old Yiddish (approximately 1250-1500), which pioneered a number of orthographic conventions not attested in other Jewish languages, followed by those of Middle Yiddish (approximately 1500-1700), which exhibits various orthographic changes that reflect phonological developments in the language vis-a-vis the Old Yiddish period. It next considers the innovations seen in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as a strong tendency to incorporate Latin-script German spelling conventions (e.g. silent h, double consonants) into Hebrew-script Yiddish. The chapter concludes with a survey of the various developments that have occurred in the 20th and 21st century, namely the emergence of several distinct standardized orthographies (YIVO, Birnbaum, Soviet Yiddish), as well as contemporary Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Yiddish spelling, which has much in common with pre-standardized Yiddish orthographies from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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