orthography

[Judith Cohen <judithrc...>]

Hi, perspective from the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino)-speaking/writing world. On 
the one hand, it's useful to have spelling norms. On the other hand, it's 
more useful to communicate. Scholars of Judeo-Spanish have developed 
Official Norms,which make perfect sense for scholarly communications and 
which are very difficult to read easily for the non-phonetically-trained 
person who just wants to read and understand. So the very simple, direct 
orthography norms used in the Israeli journal "Aki Yerushalayim" are useful 
for them. Naturally, at conferences, this is often hotly debated, sometimes 
quite acerbically - for no good reason that I can see: one set of norms is 
useful in one set of circumstances, and the other in others!
For example,I 've seen a lot of handwritten versions of Judeo-Spanish songs 
written out over the last century by mostly women. If French is a langauge 
they use regularly, they'll use French orthography, so that English ch as in 
chide comes out "tch". This makes sense to them, because with French as a 
base it would be "sh".When the original language used another alphabet - 
Judeo-Spanish, like Yiddish, used the Hebrew alphabet, with specific 
modifications - there are always going to be differences and compromises.
English spelling has not been standardized for that long, relatively 
spekaing, and it still isn't totally standardized (Canadian/British/American 
spelling of words like centre, neighbour). The Net is resulting in spelling 
changes, together with teen-spell, too. I'm not advocating chaos, just 
perspective.
Personally, I'd like to ask Reyzl or whoever has time to give us the YIVO 
norms, so that they're easily available here for those who find them 
helpful. And for those who don't, should we just agree to use a flexible 
English or American English orthography as an understood basis, as most of 
the list participants here seem to have that as a basis?
Cheers, Judith

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