Sunday, May 26, 2024

Hebrew in Latin Characters

Ze'ev Jabotinsky enthusisasts know that one of his ideas was to have Hebrew appear in Latin characters. Joseph Nedava termed it the Latinization of the Hebrew script. He wrote a book, called Taryag Millim, to raise interest. In 1931, JTA reported:
The substitution of Latin characters in the Hebrew language, too, has been urged, notably, by Mr. Ittamar Ben Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben Jahuda, the Hebrew lexicographer, and Mr. Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was sure, Mr. Jabotinsky has written, that the movement would have a great influence on the development of Hebrew by enabling many people who could not read the present Hebrew script to read Hebrew books and papers. Efforts in this direction, he said, have also been made by Dr. Bodenheimer in Cologne and by the Hebrew poet, Dr. Jacob Cohen.
Here is an example, in Jabotinsky's handwriting from 1928, notes he wrote in Hebrew Latin characters:
What I didn't know is that a periodical appeared in Tel Aviv, named Deror that attempted to put this into actual practice. A page:
It wasn't a success and the initiative never gained traction. ^

4 comments:

Rodin said...

I'm glad this didn't go far....as it is it's called "ashuri" or Assyrian script....the christian Churches never used it when writing Aramaic. The communities always used their own script....greek for Turkish, turkish arabic for Greek, Hebrew to write Arabic.
I'm surprised the turk dictator hasn't begun replacing Latin letters and back to arabic.

Viator said...
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Viator said...
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Viator said...
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