2639: Ladino Use for Solitario (Extra Hebrew Diacritics) Mar 9, 2022

Solitario and Rashi script uses diacritics for sounds not represented in a script normally intended for Hebrew. This is also the case in modern Hebrew writing, but not as much in Yiddish, which used digraphs etc., possible inspired by German which has many of the same. Presently, Hebrew only has one digraph, which is נג <ng> like it is found in English, German, and Yiddish for the [ŋ] sound. In Solitario used for Ladino, this was not the convention, and diacritics were added to letters. For instance, the [dʒ] sound in the word 'Jump' or 'Giraffe' is written ג׳‎ or גﬞ from the basic ג [g], but in Yiddish this is written -דזש <dzsh>. The only similarity between Ladino and Yiddish conventions when it comes to non-Hebrew sounds is that Yiddish also used פֿ to represent [f] as opposed to [p].

Overall, not including the ones used in Biblical Hebrew (of which there would be an additional 5), Solitario used the added forms:

זﬞ for [ʒ] (like 'viSion' or French 'Je')

טﬞ for [θ] as in 'THree'

גﬞ for [dʒ] as in Jump

2638: Solitario Script Mar 8, 2022

For all Hebrew handwriting, it does not look like printed Hebrew exactly but uses its own modern semi cursive handwriting. Like Rashi script, Solitario was a Sephardic semi cursive font used for Spanish, Ladino, and Arabic around the Mediterranean. Unlike the Ashkenazi script which grew out of it in many ways, there are more ligatures (i.e. letters joined together), and there were more diacritics used for sounds not represented in a script normally intended for Hebrew. It is also the ancestor of the modern Israeli Hebrew script, though one could not read Solitario immediately if he only knew modern Hebrew cursive.