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THE ALPHABET
"sublinear." It consists in dots and little dashes, and denotes also semivowels. It is a highly developed system and far more precise and comprehensive than the others. The Tiberiadic notation marks regularly the word-tone and secondary stresses, and so forth. It finally gained general acceptance, whereas the others fell into gradual disuse and oblivion. As its main element is the dot, the Tiberian "punctuation" was probably considered as too insignificant to infringe the prohibition of change in traditional orthography.
Other Diacritical Marks
Of the other diacritical marks, special mention must be made of the use of a dot in the consonants b, g, d, k, p and t, to harden their sounds; and of a point above the letter sh (respectively to the right or to the left), to differentiate the sounds from sh.
Origin of Punctuation Marks and their Employment
The origin of the Hebrew "punctuation" systems is still a matter of discussion among scholars. While, according to some scholars (see Professor Blake's article, Vowel Symbols in Alphabets, "JOURN. OF THE AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY," 1940), the "Hebrew systems are all based on the Nestorian dot system and therefore later than A.D. 750," according to others (V. Chomsky, The History of our Vorcelsystem in Hebrew, "THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, 1941), "the process of establishing the Hebrew vowel-systems was gradual and of long duration"; it "had been going on for centuries," and "had gone through several stages in its evolution," but "mutual influence and borrowing in this regard, in the case of Hebrew and Syriac, must not be discounted." According to Professor Chomsky, the origin of the Hebrew punctuation systems "may be traced even as far back as the period of Ezra and the Great Synagogue," although "the Tiberian system was probably not definitely fixed until about the latter part of the eighth century C.E."
Punctuation marks must not be employed in the synagogue scrolls, but they have always been used in the printing of the Bible. Otherwise they are omitted in modern printing except in poems and in literature for children-and in private correspondence.
Yiddish and Judezmo
The Hebrew script has been adapted to some other languages, such as Arabic, Turkish (as employed by the Karaite Jews in the Crimea), and so forth, but particularly to German and Spanish. It has, thus, been adopted for Judæo-German or Yiddish, and Judæo-Spanish or Judezmo.
Yiddish originated in the Middle Ages in the Rhineland; it is based on German and Hebrew, but it also absorbed words from the languages of the countries in which it was spoken, such as Polish, Russian, English, etc. Yiddish is nowadays the language of East European Jewry and of its many emigrants to other parts of Europe and overseas; in the U.S.A. there are about five million Yiddish speakers.
Yiddish employs the modern Hebrew alphabet; it is written from right to left. The letters aleph, waw, yod and 'ayin are employed as vowels, respectively as a or o;u; i (y); and e; double yod represents the diphthongs ei or ai, whereas the diphthong of is represented by the combination waw-yod.
