Hebrew Script Index for Herbs and Spices

א   ב   ג   ה   ו   ז   ח   ט   י   כ   ל   מ   נ   ס   ע   פ   צ   ק   ר   ש   ת  

ʾ   B   G   H   V   Z   Ḥ   Ṭ   Y   K   L   M   N   S   ʿ   P   Ṣ   Q   R   Š   T  

This index contains names for herbs and spices in two languages: Hebrew (unvocalized) and Yiddish. Although both languages are written in Hebrew letters (also known as Jewish Letters or Square Script), they differ in almost all other respects: Hebrew is a Semitic language related to Arabic. Yiddish, however, is based on an a Middle High German dialect that evolved into a separate language by borrowings from Hebrew and Slavonic, but even more so by cultural factors that made Yiddish a language extra­ordinarily rich in metaphors, puns and almost intranslate­able idiomatic expressions. For a native German speaker, Yiddish is not always unprob­lematical to understand, but the obstacles are hardly higher than with some of the more extreme German dialects, e.g., North German Platt or the distinct speeches in Switzerland or even Wien.

The Hebrew script, already used to write ancient religious texts like the Tora, originally codified only consonants. Because this was deemed inpractical, and because of sound shifts that moved some consonants to vowels, some letters for semivowels (vav=ו=V and yod=י=Y) came to denote chiefly the long vowels U and I, respectively (although they retain their original semivowel value on occasion). Likewise, he=ה=H became to mean a long vowel A or E word-finally. Consonant signs that indicate vowels are called matres lectionis mothers of learning.

Although Hebrew writing does not involve ligatures and context-depending glyph shaping, there are five Hebrew letters that assume a diffent shape word-finally. Unlike the situation in Arabic, these positional variants have separate Unicode codepoints. Thus the writer has always to remember to switch to the final forms when necessary. This is sometimes painful but reasonable, since the conventions of glyph choice are different in Yiddisch and Hebrew for the letter peh (פ, ף).

There is also a fully vocalized (pointed) mode of writing Hebrew, which uses a large number of additional diacritics to specify vowels and disambiguate the pronunciation of consonants. This allows to reconstruct the pronunciation of an unknown word from the written form alone, but such writing is not used for everyday purposes; rather it is restricted to language teaching and dictionaries, and of course for religious scriptures. Pointed headwords are given in a separate column as an experimental and perhaps unreliable feature.

The scripts used by Yiddish and Hebrew consist of the same letters, but Yiddish uses some of them (e.j., tav=ת=T) only in Hebrew borrowings, and modifies others by diacritical marks to represent a richer inventory of sounds (e.g., alef qamats=אָ=O). Also, Yiddish assigns some of the Hebrew letters to mean vowels unambigously, e.g., ayin=ע=ʿ represents E.

The transliteration given here is based on the scientific transliteration of Hebrew, which in turn resembles that of Arabic. I use capital letters because I feel this better fits the style of the original Hebrew. Yiddish conjuncts and ligatures have been represented by one character in transliteration, which approximately parallels the official YIVO-Transcription for Yiddish.

The sorting of the entries follows the Hebrew convention. Diacritical marks (rafe, dagesh, geresh) have been omitted in sorting, although they affect the transliteration. As a result, the collating principle is sometimes rather opaque, and cannot be inferred from a look at the transliteration column.

Hebrew names stem from the usual sources, this is, web sites, dictionaries and native speakers (this is, in different proportion, how I get most of my multilingual material). Yet this approach failed for Yiddish, since there are few Yiddish web sites in existence. There are, however, two dictionaries (English—Yiddish and Yiddish—Russian; the latter one is available only in archive.org and requires Windows-1251 transport encoding). As further help, the bilingual book entitled Di Gewiksn-Velt in Yidish [די געװיקסן־װעלט אין ייִדיש] The World of Plants in Yiddish (surprisingly, the English title is Plant Names in Yiddish) by Mordkhe Schaechter proved extremely valuable. For historical reasons, Yiddish often has a variety of different spellings for the same word.

A note for the technically minded readers: This index represents composed Yiddish letters (אָ,אַ,פּ,פֿ etc.) by a single character from the Unicode range FB00–FB4F Alphabetic Presentation Forms (NFD), although everywhere else I use sequences of letters plus diacritics (NFC). This has effects on search engine indexation and intra-site search. Also, current browsers seem to like the NFD more, despite my impression that one should go with the NFC in the long run.

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• German page (Deutsch)
• Table of Contents
• Overview
• Introduction
• Alphabetic Index
• Botanic Index
• Geographic Index
• Spice Mixture Index
• Morphological Index

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• Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages Table of Content page
• Indices Various indices to search for a particular spice
  • English All English spice names, sorted alphabetically
  • Multilingual Search spices by foreign names
    • Alphabetic More than 10000 spice names in 70+ languages
    • Greek ScriptSearch spices names in Old and Modern Greek
    • Cyrillic ScriptSearch spices names in Russian, Bulgarian, Kazakh,…
    • Hebrew ScriptSearch spices names in Hebrew and Yiddish
    • Arabic Script Search spice names in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu,…
    • Indic ScriptsSearch spice names in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu,…
    • Hanzi & Kanji Search spice names in Chinese and Japanese
  • Geographic Spices sorted according to region of origin or frequent usage
  • Botanical Spices sorted according to plant families
  • Morphologic Spices sorted according to part of the plant
  • Spice Mixtures Index of spice mixtures and their main ingredients
• Search Explanation how to use the search engine
• Other Some other texts on spices
  • Introduction Some introduction, definition, notes on copyright…
  • Overview Overview on this site, plant chemistry,…
  • References Where to learn more of spices
    • Literature Some books on spices, ethnic cookery, chemistry, scripts…
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