Re: Steg's Hebrew Romanization

On Sun, 27 Dec 1998 13:17:36 +0000 "BP.Jonsson" <bpj@...> writes:
>Steg, your ASCIIzations of Hebrew intrigues me.  Could you describe
>the
>principles? E.g., I wonder if {hh} and {tt} are Heth and Teth (or is
>it Taw
>-- as an Iranist I never remember the Semitic values right! :-0)
Thanks, well, here goes:

What i try to do is to distinguish the consonants and most of the vowels
from eachother - this doesn't work that well since there are 10 vowels,
plus 4 shvas (schwa and "hhattafim", i think they're called "ultrashort
vowels), and 22 consonants some of which have two different sounds.  I
think that capitalized letters in the middle of words are unaesthetic, so
i stay away from those, and i use a few digraphs - which unfortunately
makes me unable to show dagesh (gemination?) the way other people's
transliterations due.

Here's how i write each letter:

'aleph (only midword and at the end of _lo'_, "no")
Bet / Vet
Gimel
Dalet
Hei
Vav
Zayin
HHet     <---- (yup, you're right)
TTet     <---- (yup, you're right)
Yud
Kaf / KHaf
Lamed
Mem
Nun
Samekh
`ayin
Pei / Fei
TZadi
Quf
Reish
SHin , SSin
Tav (and _Saf_ when representing ashkenazic accent)

Vowels:

pAtahh
qAmatz
sEgol
tzEIreih
hhOlam
qOmatz-qattan
shUruq
qUbutz

and

shva na` = E  (i considered making it @, like ASCII-IPA, but the @-symbol
just looks too big to me to represent the sound.  If my emailprogram and
conlanglist could understand eachother's accented-characters i would
probably use something like an E with a fallingaccent)

Although, i've been having a problem lately trying to decide whether to
keep putting H at the end of qamatz-hei words, or drop it since it's not
"really" there (only putting it when there's a mapiq).


-Stephen (Steg)

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