Re: Summary of bidi branch?

> Cc: [email protected]
> From: David Kastrup <[email protected]>
> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:20:33 +0200
> 
> > Yes.  In Yiddish, Hebrew letters are used as transliterations of
> > Latin letters.
> 
> Uh, Eli?  I know Yiddish.

I never assumed you didn't.

> Uh no.  I need a way to write Yiddish with Hebrew letters, and so I
> was thinking of making emacs-bidi more interesting by adding (myself)
> another input encoding yielding Hebrew letters, based on the YIVO
> transliteration.

I think it would be a good addition, not only in the bidi Emacs.

> And I don't think we have any arabic input encoding in Emacs 22.

We do have the encoding (arabic-iso-8bit, albeit not thoroughly
supported), but not an input method.

> The only R-to-L script I can identify in Emacs 22 is Hebrew.  Of
> course, Emacs 22 will render it L-to-R, but making it possible to
> _input_ the Unicode might increase the number of people willing to
> invest work into emacs-bidi.

If all you want is to input characters, and don't care about
displaying them correctly, then making an input method that produces
mule-unicode-* characters should be easy.

> >> The usual alphabet used with Yiddish is a slightly modified Hebrew
> >> alphabet (pronunciation is somewhat different from most Hebrew
> >> words
> >
> > There's no standard for Yiddish pronunciation, but most Yiddish
> > speakers use German pronunciation.
> 
> Well, since Hebrew is used as a sort of phonetic spelling of Yiddish,
> there is at least a way to pronounce written Yiddish texts sort of
> regularly.

If you mean use Hebrew pronunciation, then I think that's not right: I
think the canonical Hebrew pronunciation is very different from
Yiddish, as Hebrew uses, for example, guttural sounds for some
consonants, and Yiddish does not.