Spoken English, like most languages, makes great use of semantic and pragmatic vowel length. It is not phonemic, meaning that the word you are saying will not become a different word if you lengthen one vowel, but it’s clearly a part of the way we communicate because most of us actively represent it when we text. In most writing systems, a long vowel is represented by emphasizing a vocalic sign, whether it is a glide consonant that stands for a vowel—such as in Abjads like Hebrew, most Aramaic varieties, and Arabic (these letters are called matres lectionis) — or a character that represents a vowel itself — which is either repeated or somehow embellished with a diacritic or other mark, as is the case in most Roman-based orthographies.
I know that we’ve just passed Purim and are nowhere near the season of Hanukkah, but trust me, this is a perfectly good time to talk about this topic. That’s because this article isn’t actually Hanukkah-themed at all. Today, we’re going to talk about what I call orthographic domestication: the process by which an orthographic system converts lexical items from another system by making them fit cleanly within its own norms.
For some time, Jewish people throughout the world have been known for their consistent use of the same writing system to produce written content in a variety of languages. Although, for the most part, this practice has declined in the modern age; these texts were once common to almost all Jewish communities, and their material spanned both religious contexts and every-day ones.