Ru Yi

A converter for the Yiddish language



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About this converter

You're looking at the converter designed for the texts written in Yiddish. It works as follows: You can type any text in Yiddish in square script in the form above and press the “Submit” button, afterwards you will find the same text in Latin letters (following YIVO-orthography), where there will be no deviations from standard Yiddish. Disregarding the orthography of the original text you'll find the normalized text in Latin letters.

The script of Yiddish language is based on Jewish square script. Nowadays the standard orthography developed by the Institute for Jewish Research in 1938 is used for the publicaton of most secular works. This orthography has a corresponding transliteration.However, when we deal with recent textsors with ultra-orthodox sources, we have to admit there is а number of orthographic systems, based on different principles. Moreover, each publisher followed his own orthographic variant even inside his system (being often inconsistent). That’s why we created this converter the main goal of which is to solve the problem of texts normalisation.
What does one need such a normalisation for? Besides its primary goals (convenience in reading and pronunciation), one can use it in various electronic resources. So, we realized that we needed such a normalizer and converter while working on the Corpus of Modern Yiddish. We have to admit that by now most text in the CMY belong to the modern press. There are few texts written by the classics of Yiddish literature and also not enough texts of other genres. Now we can solve the problem of the corpus disbalance.