[Sca-cooks] Some Florilegium Jewish info

[Yehoshua ben Haym]

The hebrew aleph-bet has been amazingly stable. To the point that the
average Israeli can probably go read the dead sea scrolls without to much
problem. The talmud sets down laws for how to write each letter in a torah
scroll and so on. There are some notes, some of the vowels change a bit,
but they are usually not written anyway. I can't even type them on on my
keyboard. The letter "Taf" is normally a "T" sound but some yiddish
speakers and the like say it as an "S" in some cases. With the exception
of some Timoni (Yemonite) jews most Israelis pronouce "Aleph" and "Ayin"
the same.

There are about 4 different "hands" in common use in hebrew. The standard
block printed hand (as seen in most books), a script that often looks
nothing like it which is how you write by hand. Then there is Rashi script
which is used in religious texts. Its named for Rabbi Shlomo ben Itzak
(who is known by the acronym "RaShI") but is a 17th century printers
convetion. Then there is the hand used for Torah scrolls and the like,
which is like the printed version but contains crowns and decorations.

for a good page on hebrew in general see the jewfaq.org page, I just found
this page on the torah (STA''M) hand: http://www.safrus.com/alephbet.html
(STA''M is short of "Safer Torah, Teffilin, Mezzuot" which are 3 of the
things that must be hand written)


--
Yehoshua ben Haym haYerushalmi
Senischal soon to be Shire of Beit Aryeh
MKA Zachary Kessin Jerusalem, Israel
zkessin at cs.brandeis.edu IM:ZachKessin LiveJournal: zachkessin

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Harris Mark.S-rsve60 wrote:

> Elewyiss asked:
>
>  >>>>
>
> No I wasn't. I don't suppose you have the Hebrew or Yiddish alphabeta<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
>
> hidden somewhere? I'm trying to get a letter for my name.
>
> <<<<
>
> No, I'm afraid not. Most of the information I get, such as the messages off of the net, are in ASCII text. And even when I've gotten messages or files with special charactters I've had problems handling these.
>
>
>
> In the next few weeks I should finish up my writing of my programs to modify the HTML format generated by Word for the Florilegium. Previously I was converting Word format to text which lost most special attributes and then to HTML. Then when I lost those programs I started using the (ugly) Word HTML output. As part of this latest rewrite, I am beginning to look into using the new unicode-16 or other expansions of ASCII character set. This will help display special characters sent to me in articles but may not help with copies of email programs since various filters such as in the SCA-Cooks Digestifier which creates the digest version of this list may corrupt things before I get the text. It will probably also double or more the size of the files.
>
>
>
> There still may be a problem of folks being able to display these special characters on their screens unless their software also handles this unicode-16 stuff correctly, though. That is one of the reasons I asked my earlier question about using PDF files. It sounds like most people can handle PDF files but it I were to go only to PDF files I think I would have problems with the search engines being able to find data in the Florilegium. So I've not decided how or whether to handle PDF files. However, I do have one very good article submission on brewing (Meads, I think), which I only have in PDF format because of the enclosed graphics and text.
>
>
>
> I know the Roman(?) alphabet had a number of changes through the medieval period. You can see these in the old English writings. Did the Hebrew or Yiddish alphabets change during this same time period? I might be interested in some charts or an article on these languages/alphabets if they are of concern to medieval studies.
>
>
>
> Stefan
>
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