from Hacker News

Typing in Yiddish

by gruseom on 5/3/19, 8:48 PM with 32 comments

• by jsharf on 5/3/19, 11:06 PM

  It's interesting to see that the old yiddish typewriter layout is actually not identical to the modern hebrew typing layout.

  While they're almost identical, about 5 letters have been swapped: ח, א, ס, ף, and ב is just removed from where it is in the modern layout, and moved to the top right, in a location that modern keyboard's don't have (to the right of where P would be, in QWERTY).

• by nanna on 5/4/19, 8:53 AM

  Oh my. I'm the maker of the only-cross platform Yiddish keyboard (well, macOS, Windows, Linux). I've made variants of QWERTY and the Israeli keyboard and they've been well received but life got in the way, they've suffered from bitrot, I had to take my site down,[0] people have asked me to put it back up and its been nagging me on my to do list for ages.

  This post has given me resolve to sort it out today!

  Also, I'd never heard of this Jonas and I'm going to add his variant too.

  [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20141218093006/http://shretl.org...

• by metaprotocol on 5/4/19, 8:48 AM

  Assimil have an excellent Yiddish language course.

  I would like to one day, be able to read Isaac Bashevis Singer in the original.

• by ngcc_hk on 5/4/19, 10:33 AM

  It is a manual for basically one or max two writer of the author! Private language we may argue but we know private typewriter existed.