hebcal
Ashkenazic transliterations
In the "custom calendar" the choice of Ashkenazic transliterations (incorrectly spelled "Ashkenazis") produces a very strange outcome. The only Ashkenazic feature in the resulting transliterations I see is the rendering of ת rafe as "s". Yet, there are many differences between the Israeli pronunciation (called "Sephardic") and the Ashkenazic tradition in vowels, which are not reflected (except for "o" in Shabbos). E.g. "Chanukah" is expected to be Chanukko, "Rosh Chodesh ..." must be Roysh Choydesh ..., Rosh Hashanah - Roysh Hashono, Sukkos - Sukkoys etc.
I think, if this transliteration is called "Ashkenazic", it must be either excluded from the list of choices or amended to reflect Ashkenazic Hebrew.
I think it is reflective of how English speaking Ashkenazim pronounce.
There are a few variations of how Ashkenazim pronounce.
Hungarian vs Litvish for example.
I think that someone who cares that much about "proper" pronunciation will just use the regular Hebrew. On יום ד׳, 16 בנוב 2016 at 23:00 Andrey Rozenberg [email protected] wrote:
In the "custom calendar" the choice of Ashkenazic transliterations (incorrectly spelled "Ashkenazis") produces a very strange outcome. The only Ashkenazic feature in the resulting transliterations I see is the rendering of ת rafe as "s". Yet, there are many differences between the Israeli pronunciation (called "Sephardic") and the Ashkenazic tradition in vowels, which are not reflected (except for "o" in Shabbos). E.g. "Chanukah" is expected to be Chanukko, "Rosh Chodesh ..." must be Roysh Choydesh ..., Rosh Hashanah - Roysh Hashono, Sukkos - Sukkoys etc.
I think, if this transliteration is called "Ashkenazic", it must be either excluded from the list of choices or amended to reflect Ashkenazic Hebrew.
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Ashkenazic pronunciation is not a single system: it has a spectrum of styles. The most "proper" one is the pronunciation used for Torah reading and that is exactly what I used in the above examples. On the opposite side of the spectrum is the so-called "informal Ashkenazic", which is also more or less reflected in the Hebrew component of Yiddish.
Most of the Hebrew words in English speech of traditional English-speaking Ashkenazim AFAIK come from Yiddish. Thus, irrespective of the your intention, Rosh Hashanah is not Ashkenazic. In the "formal" Ashkenazic it is Roysh Hashono, in the informal style - Rosh Hashono/Rosh Hashone/Rosh Ashone/Rosh Ashono/Rosheshone etc. There is no dialect of Yiddish or Ashkenazic Hebrew in which it would be Rosh Hashanah. (The forms I provide are from the averaged "standard" of Vilna, in Hungarian Yiddish/Hebrew it would be Roysh Hashunu/Rosh Hashunu in Litvish Reysh Hashono/Rosh Hashone etc.)
You aren't really disagreeing with me. I said there are a few correct pronunciations of Hebrew for Ashkenazim. G-d forbid that some one would daven like it is transliterated here :) . That being said, IMO the transliterations being used are what is most popular and what most English speakers are likely to be used to. Does some one that really cares about the proper pronunciation use the English transliterated version, or the hebrew version?
I think most people that ask for the English transliterated version are going to want to see it written as the see it in their ArtScroll siddur.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArtScroll#Transliteration_system
And if it was switched to "Proper" transliteration, why just "Vilna" ? If your feature is added, then it should be for all pronunciations, as well as "Informal".
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 1:38 PM Andrey Rozenberg [email protected] wrote:
Ashkenazic pronunciation is not a single system: it has a spectrum of styles. The most "proper" one is the pronunciation used for Torah reading and that is exactly what I used in the above examples. On the opposite side of the spectrum is the so-called "informal Ashkenazic", which is also more or less reflected in the Hebrew component of Yiddish.
Most of the Hebrew words in English speech of traditional English-speaking Ashkenazim AFAIK comes from Yiddish. Thus, irrespective of the original intention, Rosh Hashanah is not Ashkenazic. In the "formal" Ashkenazic it is Roysh Hashono, in the informal style - Rosh Hashono/Rosh Hashone/Rosh Ashone/Rosh Ashono/Rosheshone etc. There is no dialect of Yiddish or Ashkenazic Hebrew in which it would be Rosh Hashanah. (The forms I provide are from the averaged "standard" of Vilna, in Hungarian Yiddish/Hebrew it would be Roysh Hashunu/Rosh Hashunu in Litvish Reysh Hashono/Rosh Hashone etc.)
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Your intention is well understood. What I am arguing against is calling these transliterations "Ashkenazis" (sic). The best solutions in my opinion are either to remove this option altogether or otherwise amend the transliterations to reflect the more heimishe Yiddish-like pronunciations.
If we go for the second option: Rosh Choydesh/Rosh Hashone is the accepted common denominator, but I agree that it would be nice to also have litvish-chabadishe (Rosh Cheydesh) and poylish-ungerishe (Rosh Hashune) versions as well.
I think we can agree that there won't be a single "ashkenazic" that will satisfy everyone
Michael, do you have any usage data from hc.com for ashekenazis mode?
Andrey, Yisrael, I'm perfectly happy to support (the idea of) a framework for various transliterations, probably leveraging the extant localization infrastructure.
Please propose a default set that makes sense ArtScroll/poylish-ungarische/etc.
Here is my proposal with a pair of examples. As long as the ArtScroll transliterations are not called Ashkenazic, it is OK: after all, I am personally not familiar with the numbers for English-speaking Ashkenazim without Yiddish background in terms of their preference of ArtScroll-like pronunciation of Loshn Koydesh words in everyday life.
| ראש חודש | ראש השנה | סוכות | שבת | פסח | ערב | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Sephardi" (Israeli) | Rosh Chodesh | Rosh Hashanah | Sukkot | Shabbat | Pesach | Erev |
| ArtScroll | Rosh Chodesh | Rosh Hashanah | Sukkos | Shabbos | Pesach | Erev |
| Ashkenazi standard (Vilna) | Rosh Choydesh | Rosh Hashono | Sukkos | Shabbos | Peysach | Erev |
| Ashkenazi northern (litvish incl. Chabad) | Rosh Cheydesh | Rosh Hashono | Sukkos | Shabbos | Peysach | Erev |
| Ashkenazi southern (poylish-ungerish) | Rosh Choydesh | Rosh Hashunu | Sikkos | Shabbos | Paysach | Eyrev |
The spelling is quite arbitrary.
Here's a breakdown from server logs for popularity:
320 pl (Polish translit)
878 ru (Russian translit)
31351 sh (Sephardic translit + Hebrew)
56955 h (Hebrew)
74676 a (Ashkenazis translit)
176511 ah (Ashkenazis translit + Hebrew)
1977811 s (Sephardic translit)
So Ashkenazis translit is used about 11% of the time.
Dovid
I think that the default set should stay "Artscroll" as I think that most yiddin that want transliteration don't know enough to care about "Proper" transliteration, and using "Proper" transliterations will confuse your average user.
Is "Rosh Hashana" proper pronunciation of ראש השנה? Of course not, but every one knows what you mean.
if you change it to "Roysh Hoshono", or "Roysh HuShuno" or, "Reish Hoshono" or some other permutation, there will be people who don't know what your talking about.
Again, some one who cares about proper pronunciation is NEVER going to use transliteration, the people that want transliteration here are most likely going to be the same people that are going to want to use a transliterated siddur.
https://www.google.co.il/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjY1bKW5bbQAhUIwxQKHSZkBCIQFggZMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.artscroll.com%2FCategories%2FPTR.html&usg=AFQjCNHuWMXAm-t7CiPJX0HqNRgm-F5bIA&sig2=AUhpf3ICUS1ZeLoJMxeupw&bvm=bv.139250283,d.d24
On יום ו׳, 18 בנוב 2016 at 15:34 dsadinoff [email protected] wrote:
I think we can agree that there won't be a single "ashkenazic" that will satisfy everyone
Michael, do you have any usage data from hc.com for ashekenazis mode?
Andrey, Yisrael, I'm perfectly happy to support (the idea of) a framework for various transliterations, probably leveraging the extant localization infrastructure.
Please propose a default set that makes sense ArtScroll/poylish-ungarische/etc.
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@yisraeldov Now I don't see your point. It seems, we have agreed that the transliterations are merely for the convenience of the user, not for davnen. What I propose above is retaining ArtScroll (naming them as such) and add informal Ashkenazic transliterations. I do not insist on dialectal variants.
it looks like we have a מחלוקת במציאות on what most people will want. I think that most yidden that want transliteration will want the artscroll version, you don't think so.
I think this is something that can and should be verified before making any changes.
On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 10:39 AM Andrey Rozenberg [email protected] wrote:
@yisraeldov https://github.com/yisraeldov Now I don't see your point. It seems, we have agreed that the transliterations are merely for the convenience of the user, not for davnen. What I propose above is retaining ArtScroll (naming them as such) and add informal Ashkenazic transliterations. I do not insist on dialectal variants.
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Here's what I'd like to happen:
- the semantics of the -a "ashkenazis" switch are going to be given a new name "Hebcal-ashkenazis" which will be whatever we want, and look a lot like it currently does, giving us the freedom to maintain stability or step on whosever's toes we wish, but not in the name of ArtScroll.
- Someone does a bit more legwork, possibly on opensiddur-tech https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/opensiddur-tech to determine if we can learn anything more to refine Andrey's excellent first steps towards a taxonomy of ashkenazic transliteration varieties. I'm happy to do it, but it'll take me a month or two to find the time.
- we'll add a bunch of other transliterations which will include whatever our taxonomy turns out to be, most likely including "ArtScroll-compatible", "Vilna", "Polish" etc.
- profit!
...or we could just leave out step 2 but you get the idea: Everybody gets the transliteration they want, they just have to ask for it by name.
I'd welcome additional transliterations. Note there's also an open request to translate/transliterate into French. https://github.com/hebcal/hebcal/issues/104
If someone on this thread would like to get started, the place to start is to clone the he.po file and to send a pull request with your vilna.po or whatever file. Take a look at this directory:
https://github.com/hebcal/hebcal/tree/master/po
Translations added to this directory get picked up by the po2gperf.pl script, which compiles them into static string dictionaries that are available to the --lang command-line flag, first introduced in hebcal 4.4.
So a future version could be invoked using something like hebcal --lang vilna -s -c -C Jerusalem 2017
Once the translations are available in the underlying hebcal base project, it's easy to expose them to the hebcal.com website.
If the community of people contributing and reviewing transliterations is going to expand, you may want to use Transifex to make things easy for non-technical people. Transifex is free for open source projects. See http://docs.transifex.com/faq/
The results of any work done at Transifex can be exported to a .po file and many other formats.
Sarah, can Transifex handle very nonstandard "languages"? These aren't really languages at all, but rather transliterations of dialects, so we're talking about "Hebrew, spoken in the Vilna dialect, transliterated into English"
For our own internal use I was going to suggest something as simple as en-vilna
But a cursory glance at Transifex seems like it might be tightly tied to the ISO standards for languagages, which these transliteration schemes will never appear as a part of.
Note that we aren't using GNU gettext so we don't have to adhere to ISO lang codes. There is a good cross-platform .po editing tool called Poedit which seems to work on with our nonstandard naming convention so far...
Regarding Transifex - I have used it with another open source project called "CiviCRM". They had to do some extra one-time setup to handle things like "French - Canadian" , "French - France", and similar for the Spanish dialects. You can see their translations at: https://www.transifex.com/civicrm/civicrm/
The primary reason CiviCRM adopted Transifex is to automate things for new versions, and to allow casual, non-techie people to participate. They also have a larger community than HebCal, so it may be overkill to use for HebCal.
Per the transliterations being discussed on this thread, I would call them all dialects of Hebrew or dialects of Yiddish.
Another example to review at https://www.transifex.com/civicrm/civicrm/ is the stuff for Serbian, which is 1 language that can be written in 2 alphabets.
On the Transifex page for CiviCRM: Serbian (Latin) (Serbia) - ie Serbian written in the Latin alphabet Serbian (Serbia) - ie Serbian written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
OK, it seems that technically, even now, it is straightforward to implement new transliteration, so I see no principal obstacle in doing so. Let me create a pair of new .po files and come back with a pull request.
Huh, sorry for the delay, I was busy a bit with my PhD defense. Here is the first trial: https://github.com/har-wradim/hebcal/tree/master/po, not a pull request yet, but I am on it. I am less familiar with the Southern pronunciation, but it is on the plan. We'd need some verification I guess.
Chag sameach to everyone!
The guys who are doing the translation don't care how it is in the siddiurim. There are some modern rules for transliteration that I've never seen anyone use.
On Fri, Jan 26, 2018, 11:43 IsaacC21 [email protected] wrote:
This is honestly way over my head is there a wordpress plugin that just has it in Hebrew. No transliteration.
The one you guys proposed as being "Sepharadi" isn't Sepharadi at all if you look at most Sepharadi Siddurim the ח is expressed by using a "Ḥ" and the כ is expressed by using a "kh". "Ch" in English makes 3 sounds cheese, Michigan and mechanic. And in German it makes the IPA of /x/.
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@yisraeldov I made the mistake earlier by commenting before knowing what this thread initially was I thought this was for a WordPress Zemannim plugin thread. I forgive me for my earlier comments.
In the light of all of this I created as a .po file for a Sepharadi transliteration (not 'Sfardi" Israeli). There are many ways i could have done it but i went based of the pronunciation and spellings the Jews of the Levantine, Egypt, Turkey, etc. It isn't quite inline with the Yemeni or Baghdadi traditions. I can't please everyone - but it hits what most Pan-Sepharadim would call the basics. I created it by editing the Hebrew .po file. I didn't edit the above about the "Copyright" and all that Jazz. I just edited the necessary fields.
