(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
A recommendation that Yiddish should be printed and written in Latin characters was rejected by the All-Soviet Jewish Cultural Congress held recently in Charkoff.
The Yiddish Communist organ. “Emes” published an article warning against dangerous experimenting with Yiddish orthography on the ground that it made it more difficult to win new readers. It was necessary, the article pointed out, to have uniformity. Decisions should not be made by the authorities on language and the writers, but by the teachers, the cultural workers, and the readers themselves. The best rationalization of Yiddish orthography, it said, would be to replace the present Hebrew alphabet with Latin characters, which would practically solve all the problems of Yiddish orthography, but under present conditions, such a reform would be followed by very lamentable results. “All our influence on Yiddish cultural life would be at an end because the Yiddish language in Latin characters would lose its mass of readers,” the paper stated.
The substitution of Latin characters for Hebrew has been suggested in regard to the Hebrew language as well as Yiddish. Recently Ittamar Ben Avi, the editor of the “Doar Hayom,” issued several Hebrew books printed in Latin characters.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
