So, I've been studying Yiddish for nearly a year at this point, and it continues to hold my interest; that fact itself is something of a novelty. It's an interesting language.

And one of its many interesting features is its orthography. Like many, but certainly not all, other languages, Yiddish went through a relatively vigorous process of standardization and tumult; like perhaps not quite so many that process has been very well-documented, and is still discussed with great... interest by a very good portion of its speakers and writers.

One of the aspects of the orthography which interests me at the moment is its treatment of what is known as loshn-koydesh, the portion of the vocabulary which derives from Aramaic and Hebrew. Hebrew, as you may know, is an abjad, which doesn't under normal circumstances write out any of its vowels. Yiddish is not. Germanic languages not being particularly suited to that sort of shortcut, it has developed pretty stable letters for all of the vowels--except when it comes to writing any word that was borrowed into the language from the Hebrew or Aramaic, like toyre, ganef, oylem, et cetera.

So what we end up with is very interesting: it's almost like there are two parallel orthographies in any given Yiddish text. One is highly phonemic, totally explicit, and very European, and one is totally semitic, rather oblique, and derives straight from a language that has no genealogical relationship to Yiddish, but nevertheless informs it and filters through in just about every context. And depending on the origin of the word in question, you use the same alphabet to write it in two utterly different ways, according to two different sets of rules.

Have you ever heard of such a thing, lazyweb? I guess the eastern scripts, Japanese in particular, have a similar thing going. Kanji for the bulk of the words, and then Kana for anything you need to spell out. Almost a reverse situation. Any more?