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- Title
Digraphia maintenance and loss among Eastern European Jews: intertextual and interlingual print conventions in Ashkenazic linguistic culture since 1800.
- Authors
Fishman, Joshua A.
- Abstract
In the early nineteenth century a widely practiced from of digraphia. functionally differentiating between two type-fonts, began to fall apart in Eastern Europe. This differentiation had existed from the very beginnings of Hebrew print in Western and Central Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. One of these fonts, variously referred to as "square type" or "Assyrian writing," was generally reserved for materia sancta per se (the Pentateuch, other books of the Bible, the Tahmud, and the Prayer Books for weekday or Sabbath and holiday services. Except for the ancient Judeo-Aramaic translation-of the Pentateuch (Onkelos), often considered to be co-holy with the Hebrew original, all other translations into PostExilic Jewish vernaculars and all rabbinic responsa dealing with questions of halakhic interpretation were printed in the font known as "Rashi writing." This font was named after the outstanding eleventh-century German/French commentator whose manuscript "hand" became the prototype for all subsequent Rabbinic and Jewish vernacular publications, whether in Hebrew, Ladino/Judezmo or Yiddish. In sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, a version of "Rashi writing" became intimately associated with Yiddish as the vehicle of a sizable and a popular literature translating and commenting upon Holy Writ. Only when a large number of small printing establishments arose in Poland, White Russia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine specializing solely in mass-market chap-books and inexpensive editions of all holy books did a wholesale transition to just one type face, the square letters occur for both Yiddish and Holy Writ per se. Rashi-type scripts remained (and linger on, in part, to this very day) for Rashi per se, some...
- Subjects
WRITING; HEBREW printing; HEBREW literature; GRAPHIC arts; LANGUAGE &; languages; HEBREW alphabet
- Publication
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2001, Vol 2001, Issue 150, p27
- ISSN
0165-2516
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ijsl.2001.034