Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2018 07:42:54 -0500
Noticed something really fascinating in an old pamphlet I was reading. It's from 1922, in Hebrew mostly but with some Yiddish at the end. The Yiddish spelling is not according to more modern standardization, but seems to be significantly more faithful to the German spellings of the same words, replacing Latin letters with Hebrew ones more than respelling phonetically. And there are even places where it appears they represented a German ä with a Hebrew aleph—with an umlaut! Actually it looks a little more like a double acute accent but that's surely a style choice, since it obviously is mapping to an umlaut.
(Note also the spelling דיע, a calque for German "die", where modern Yiddish would spell it phonetically as די.)
I do NOT think this needs any special encoding, btw. I would probably encode this as simply U+05D0 U+0308 (א̈). Combining symbols do not (necessarily) belong to a specific alphabet, and the fact that most fonts would render this badly is a different issue. I just thought the people here might find it interesting.
(Link is http://rosetta.nli.org.il/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE36609604&_ga=2.182410660.2074158760.1541729874-1781407841.1541729874 look at the last few pages.)
~mark
