1938: Orthography Differences: Hebrew and Yiddish Apr 5, 2020

Every language, assuming it has a writing system at all, will have different ways of dealing with sounds not neatly represented by one letter. English uses 'h' often in combinations like CH, SH, TH, PH and GH for what are actually single sounds (monophthongs), but Hebrew uses an apostrophe in order represent that the sound is a variant of another letter in the alphabet, such as ג usually representing /g/ is rendered 'ג for the /dʒ/ sound as in 'ginger' or simply /ʒ/ as in the French 'je'. Likewise the /t͡ʃ/ sound, usually written CH in English, is represented as a variant of צ (like TS), 'צ. In Yiddish however, written in the same alphabet, those two sounds are rendered as דזש (like DZSH in 'jungle), זש (like ZSH, as in the French 'je') and טש (TSH in 'chirp') respectively. Many of those same patterns for Yiddish are similar to those used in German, even though German uses the Latin alphabet.

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