Unicode Settings for Yiddish Special Characters

It's important to standardize our usage of Unicode for Yiddish so that we can effectively share documents, search for text strings, etc. Most Yiddish letters are straightforward, but others involve special characters and/or combinations of basic Unicode characters. It is possible to obtain characters which appear to be the same, but which actually use different codes (e.g., when deciding which pintl to add to a shin to create a sin). The following chart is intended to help standardize the creation of Yiddish characters. The selection of characters is consistent with those used by Noyekh Miller in preparing the extensive and growing collection of Yiddish texts on the Mendele web page. Please send any comments about Unicode for Yiddish to the UYIP discussion group. To see the complete official list of Unicodes for Hebrew and Yiddish, see <http://www.unicode.org/charts/> and <http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/WinCP.asp>.

Yiddish Character	Unicode hex	Unicode Subset	Comments
-	05BE	5	makef (Yiddish hyphen) *
-	002D	0	minus sign (English hyphen) *
–	2013	32	long dash (en dash)
_	005F	0	underline symbol (for forms)
( )	0028, 0029	0	Parenthesis – Same as English, except need to place them backwards (left paren. on key for right paren., etc) so that they won’t appear backwards when typing R2L.
	05C3	5	Yiddish colon – (different code from the English colon at 003A, subset 0)
	05F3	5	Geresh – Yiddish apostrophe (different from the curved English apostrophe at Unicode 0022, subset 0)
	05F4	5	Gershayim – Yiddish double apostrophe (different from a curved quotation mark)
	201C 201E	32	Yiddish superscript (upper left) ending quote / Yiddish subscript (lower right) beginning quote
	201C 201D	32	Yiddish superscript (upper left) ending quote / Yiddish superscript (upper right) beginning quote (often used for book titles, etc.)
	Alef + 05B7	5	Pasekh-alef
	Alef + 05B8	5	Komets-alef
	Beys + 05BF	5	veys
	Vov (05D5) + 05BC	5	Melupm vov
	Plain khuf + 05BC	5	Kof (with dagesh)
	Yud (05D9) + 05B4	5	khirek yud
	05F2 + 05B7	5	Pasekh-tsvey-yudn
	Plain fey + 05BC	5	Pey (with dagesh)
	Plain fey + 05BF	5	Fey (standard orthography)
	Shin + 05C2	5	sin
	Sof + 05BC	5	tof

* A word about the makef and the hyphen. In a well designed font, the makef (Yiddish hyphen) should be even with the top of the letters, as in the above example, pictured in Times New Roman. Unfortunately, most fonts which come with Windows are poorly designed and misplace the makef too high, making it hard to read. When using these other fonts, some people will prefer to use an English hyphen (or minus sign) which places the dash about mid-level between the top and bottom of the surrounding letters.

Click here for another list of Unicode settings for Yiddish characters, based on the UYIP keyboad layout designed by Mark David, (the Yiddish keyboard layout which is similar to an Israeli Hebrew keyboard).