UYIP
The Mailing List for
Understanding Yiddish Information Processing

UYIP@THEWORLD.COM

To subscribe to UYIP send E-Mail to uyip-request@theworld.com with a blank subject and containing just the word subscribe. After you subscribe, you'll be sent the UYIP info file via E-Mail with additional details.

Guides

• A Users' Guide to Yiddish on the Internet - by Shoshke-Reyzl Juni
• Yiddish on Unix Guide - by Raphael Finkel
• Hebrew Computing on Windows - for Yiddish and other Jewish languages - by Tsuguya Sasaki
• Hebrew for Windows 95/98/Me - how to add Hebrew (Yiddish) support to older Windows versions - by Gyula Zsigri
• UYIP with Unicode - links to Yiddish documents in Unicode, and Unicode-related info and links - by Mark David

General Yiddish Information Processing Resources

• A Users' Guide to Yiddish on the Internet, compiled by Susannah Juni.
  
  
• UYIP with Unicode, where Unicode Yiddish documents are catalogued, and where information about Unicode, especially as it relates to Yiddish, is available. Visit http://www.uyip.org/unicode/.
  
  
• Other Mailing Lists of Interest:
  
  
  
  • Yiddishnet: subscription form / archive
    
    
  • Mendele: Yiddish Literature and Language: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/
    
    
  • ILAN-H: Discussion regarding Hebrew in E-Mail, as well as discussions of Hebrew in other TCP/IP protocols, is discussed in the ilan- h@vm.tau.ac.il list. To subscribe send mail to
    listserv@vm.tau.ac.il
    with one line of text as follows:
    subscribe ilan-h firstname lastname
    with your first and last name in place of firstname and lastname.
    
    
  • Hebrew Computing: http://www.egroups.com/group/hebrewcomputing/info.html
    
    
  • Ivrix - Linux/Hebrew
  
  
  
• RFC 1555: Hebrew Character Encoding for Internet Messages describes a protocol for transmitting Hebrew in the ISO-8859-8 character set. This encoding can only contain Hebrew letters without vowels, and therefore does not support Yiddish.
  
  
• Ulrich Greve's Free Downloadable Yiddish Software site has great, original software with the Yiddish language featured front and center. Examples: a Yiddish OCR program, a Yiddish-English Dictionary program, etc.
  
  
• Days and Months (Yiddish Localization Information)
  
  
• Phonetic Yiddish Keyboards (QWERTY-based): http://www.shoshke.net/uyip/keyboards.htm. Join the UYIP mailing list for a discussion of QUERTY-based phonetic keyboard designs for Yiddish information processing.
  
  
• Hebrew Keyboards: http://www.uyip.org/keyboards.html. Join the UYIP mailing list for a discussion of keyboard designs for Yiddish information processing.
  
  
• Raphael Finkel's Yidishe Shraybmashinke (Yiddish Typewriter), a tool for Composing Yiddish through the Web, and also for translating between various character sets, document formats, and encodings, at http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html . It lets you compose a page of Yiddish text, typed in transliteration, in a number of formats, including images (GIF's) that you can immediately see. It also can produce Unicode documents in Windows Hebrew Code Page 1255, MacOS Hebrew, Unicode UCS-2 and UTF-8 formats, and PostScript files. A heymish Yiddish font is also provided. A truly wonderful resource. Thank you Raphael! Lang zolt ir lebn rafoyl!
  
  
• Raphael Finkl's Shraybmashinke uses his a Yiddish Word List. He recently (29-Aug-2002) sent UYIP this note about the word list:
  

  
  I have recently applied my Yiddish word list to various purposes:
  
  1.  Spelling checkers.  I have such a list for vim and AbiWord.  It should be
  possible to just use http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/private/yiddish.utf.list [to be viewed with UTF-8 encoding] as
  a spelling list for MS Word; if someone will try it, please let me know!
  
  2.  Crossword puzzle generation.  I have just started this with Sholem Berger.
  Some of the automatically generated puzzles may be submitted to the Forverts.
  The software I am using was built by Robert Morris of Harvard in 1995.
  
  3.  Rhyming dictionary.  See
  http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/private/yiddish.rhyme.zip .
  
  4.  Yiddish vocabulary exercise.  See http://www.newslate.com/indexyiddish.htm .  (The software
  was built by the folks at NewSlate.)
  
  5.  Online dictionaries.  See
  http://www.tichnut.de/jewish/yiddishdictionary.html .  The software was built
  by Ulrich Greve.
  
  I am sure other ideas will present themselves.  Meanwhile, I continue to add to
  the vocabulary list and to fix errors.  Thanks to Ulrich Greve, there are now
  genders for most nouns.
  
  Refoyl

  
  
  
• Unicode Hebrew Code Block (PDF)
  
  
• Unicode Alphabetic Presentation Forms (PDF), including forms used in standard Yiddish orthography. (Note: these forms are generally to be used for compatibility; modern applications should use composition of characters from the Hebrew code block.)
  
  
• The combinations of Unicode characters needed for Yiddish according to its Standardized Orthography are shown here: http://www.uyip.org/combinations.html .
  
  
• The Unicode characters for Hebrew digraphs needed for Yiddish are shown here: http://www.uyip.org/digraphs.html
  
  
• (The rest of the characters needed for Yiddish are just the 22 Hebrew letters, and 5 final letter forms. Not shown, but available from many sources; see further below for the Unicode table.)
  
  
• A general guide to Hebrew information processing, primarily intended for those dealing with the Hebrew language, is at: http://www.qsm.co.il/Hebrew/
  
  
• Nir Dagen's Review of Hebrew-language Support in Browsers.
  
  
• More resources to come; stay tuned....

Yiddish Documents

Here are some documents in Yiddish and English to accompany the UYIP mailing list.

Kinds of documents currently supplied are:

1. MacOS Hebrew Plain Text - These documents are encoded using the MacOS Hebrew character set. In order to view them, you need to use Netscape on the Macintosh, set document encoding to User-defined, go to General Preferences, choose the fonts preferences dialog, choose user-defined under "for the encoding", then choose one of the fonts included in the Apple Hebrew Language Kit, e.g., corsiva, new peninim, etc. Refer to ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/HEBREW.TXT for the set of characters in MacOS Hebrew, along with a mapping for each character in Unicode designed to achieve 100% roundtrip compatibility. (Note: this method is generally not suitable for creating usable Unicode documents, i.e., one-way mapping.)

   Note: make sure to choose a font encoded according to the Macintosh Hebrew character set in its entirety -- many/most Hebrew fonts for the Mac don't comply: in particular, they do not properly encode the double-yod with patah ("pasekh-tsvey-yudn") or rafe ("dekhele") characters. All of the fonts shipped by Apple with the Hebrew Language Kit are fine.

   
   
   
2. Windows Hebrew Plain Text - These documents are encoded using the Windows Hebrew character set (also known as Code Page 1255, or CP1255). There are currently few browsers that properly display Yiddish. Stay tuned. Refer to ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOWS/CP1255.TXT for the set of characters in Windows Hebrew, along with a mapping for each character in Unicode designed to achieve 100% roundtrip compatibility. (Note: Windows 1255 maps quite well to Unicode, especially for Yiddish. There is practically a one-to-one correspondence between their Hebrew characters, including those used for Yiddish.)
   
   
   
3. GIF Files - standard Compuserve and Web image file format. Viewable on Netscape and just about any other kind of browser. Binary data, not text of any kind. (However, in most cases, these just illustrate the way text is supposed to look; i.e., these provide a "picture" of text.)
   
   
4. Unicode HTML files - Web text pages encoded in Unicode, primarily in the Unicode Hebrew block (Range 0590..05FF). The text is in HTML, that is, some version along the lines of the latest emerging Internet standards, namely the proposal for Internationalization of HTML, which is incorporated into the W3C's HTML 4.0 specification. Yiddish Unicode HTML files should be viewable with any web browser that supports all of the Hebrew characters of Unicode version 1.1 or later. Get one of the available Yiddish-capable web browsers to view a page in Unicode HTML files.
   
   
5. Miscellaneous HTML files - presumably containing no special or interesting encodings, and viewable with any old graphic Web browser -- may have links to other, more interesting documents.

Here are the documents:


• sorttakones.txt, rules for sorting Yiddish according to the YIVO standard, as a plain text file (MacOS Hebrew Plain Text)
  
  
• sorttakones-cp1255.txt, same thing, but as a Windows Hebrew plain text file
  
  
• sorttakones.gif, same thing, but as an image (GIF file)
  
  
• dosgebet.txt, I. L. Peretz's poem as a plain text file (MacOS Hebrew Plain Text)
  
  
• dosgebet-cp1255.txt, same thing, but as Windows Hebrew plain text file
  
  
• dosgebet.gif, same thing, but as an image (GIF file)
  
  
• rotshd.txt, Excerpt of Sholem Aleichem's "If I Were Rothschild" as a plain text file (MacOS Hebrew Plain Text)
  
  
• rotshd-cp1255.txt, same thing, but as Windows Hebrew plain text file
  
  
• rotshd.gif, same thing, but as an image (GIF file)
  
  
• breyshes.txt, In the Beginning: Genesis (B'reyshes) in Yiddish by Yehoash as a plain text file (MacOS Hebrew Plain Text)
  
  
• breyshes-cp1255.txt, same thing, but as a Windows Hebrew plain text file
  
  
• breyshes.gif, same thing, but as an image (GIF file)
  
  
• Raphael Finkel's Hayzele - Link to the WORLD'S FIRST UNICODE YIDDISH HTML DOCUMENT!!, at least as far as any of us knows of. This page actually just contains an image (.gif) of what the renderer should produce. But there's a link to the equivalent HTML document, both in Unicode's UCS-2 and UTF-8 encodings. You need a Yiddish-capable web browser to view this page.
  
  
• badkhn.txt about a Jewish wedding in Marmarosh with the Wedding Jester Hirsh-Leyb Gottlieb / a khasene mit hirsh-leyb gotlib, marshalek (badkhn) fun maremoresh (MacOS Hebrew Plain Text)
  
  
• badkhn-cp1255.txt, same thing, but as a Windows Hebrew plain text file
  
  
• badkhn1.gif GIF (part 1) of the above document
  
  
• badkhn2.gif GIF (part 2) of the above document

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Unless otherwise noted, this document and all documents at this site Copyright (c) 2003 - 2009 to: Mark H. David (E-Mail: mhd@yv.org), All Rights Reserved.