Certain words, like “Torah” and “kosher” have been adopted into English. Please, show me a graceful way to transliterate the bracha “gaw-al Yisroel!”Īnother challenge is what to italicize as a foreign word. But it’s not practical to write Avrawhawm, Yisrawel and shawlom. “Yisrael” looks like it’s written with a pasach in Hebrew (“ah”), while “Yisroel” looks like it’s written with a cholam (“oh”). But for those of us who speak Ashkenazi-style, in which a kamatz is pronounced like “aw” in “fawn,” there’s no good transliteration. If one speaks with Sefardi-style pronunciation, in which the kamatz is pronounced the same as the pasach ( patach ), it’s not much of a problem: Avraham, Yisrael, shalom. As much as I like to kibbitz (only half-jokingly) about taf and saf (see this article from the OU’s Jewish Action magazine), the vowel kamatz is actually far more difficult to handle in transliteration. Let’s get back to Avraham/Avrohom for a second. If such a discrepancy can be true for Moshe, as well as for other “simple” names like Avraham (Avrohom), Yaakov (Yaacov), and Eisav (Aisav), imagine the variations we get for names like Achashverosh, Cheftzibah or Mahershalalchashbaz. I find it interesting that Rav Twersky’s colleagues and students spelled the series name “Moshe” even though the one whose content they present spelled his name “Mosheh.”) (There’s a series on OU Torah called VaYigdal Moshe, featuring divrei Torah by Rav Mosheh Twersky HY”D. (272,000 Google results, including Strong’s Hebrew Lexicon, which is a fairly significant source.) It’s hard to say that “Mosheh” is “wrong” because, technically, it’s a more accurate transliteration as the name Moshe ends in a letter hei in Hebrew, which is not reflected by the standard English spelling. And yet, the transliteration “Mosheh” is not unprecedented. Let’s take a word with an almost universally-accepted transliteration: the name Moshe. Right off the bat, there’s the issue of transliteration, which is no small thing. But as much as we love to nitpick and debate about the rules of English, the job of a writer/editor is exponentially more complicated when you mix a second language into the equation, especially one with a completely different character set. My recent opinion piece on the evils of the Oxford comma was more popular than I had anticipated apparently, I’m not the only person with strong feelings about punctuation.
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