Yiddish Empowerment Coach has an interesting Facebook post:
What if I told you that sometimes, transliteration is more authentic than using the alef-beys?
We’re often taught that “real” Yiddish lives in the alef-beys. And those who can’t read it yet? They often feel ashamed. Unskilled. Left out of classes and locked out of literature.
And yes — the alphabet matters. Standardization matters. It lets us teach, publish, and build a shared language in an ancient script dripping with heritage. But standardization also smooths. It evens out quirks. It blurs regional music into one correct, homogeneous voice.
Which is why I love a little joke book called Royte Pomerantsn.
In the early 1900s, the ethnographer Immanuel Olsvanger collected Jewish folk humor in Lithuanian shtetlekh — and published it in transliteration. Not neat, standardized YIVO transliteration. A quirky, phonetic system that captures the Litvish dialect of his storytellers. So you see:
– dar instead of der
– id instead of yid
– nit instead of nisht
– zakh instead of zikh
Sure, he could have written דערצייל in Hebrew letters. But then how would you know if the storyteller said dertseyl or dartseyl or even dertsayil? On the page, it would all look the same. Standardization unifies, but it also erases.
Royte Pomerantsn preserves the mouthfeel. The ta’am. The specific music of a particular region, a particular human being telling a joke. So I’ll say it again: Sometimes transliteration is more authentic than alef-beys. And pedagogically? It’s powerful.
I use this book even with students who CAN read the alef-beys!
Because Yiddish isn’t just a system to master. It’s a living chorus of voices — regional, imperfect, textured, embodied.Sometimes transliteration isn’t a crutch. Sometimes it’s a magnifying glass. And sometimes the thing people feel ashamed of — “I can’t read the alphabet yet” — isn’t a barrier to authenticity at all. Sometimes it lets you hear something you might otherwise miss.
Gerekht?
I hadn’t thought about that, but it makes sense to me (I’m sure rozele will have things to say). And I’ve long loved Royte Pomerantsn; I could have sworn I’d posted about it way back when, but if so I can’t find it.
Standardization v. variation in Hebrew-scripted Yiddish orthography is not something I know anything about (others who frequent the Hattery will), but whether or not it is a traditional practice I am reasonably confident that the “alef-bays” script can in principle be used for “quirky, phonetic” eye-dialect purposes just as well as Latin-alphabet glyphs can be, with the orthography adjusted as needed by pronunciation variations.