Skip to content

Deprecate alternate spellings of hebrew characters #61

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 3 commits into from
May 18, 2025
Merged

Conversation

Enivex
Copy link
Collaborator

@Enivex Enivex commented May 17, 2025

We had two alternate spellings largely because there was no mechanism for deprecation at the time. I'm not opposed to maintaining more than one name for a symbol if they're fundamentally different and there's a good reason for it, but different romanizations is many steps too far in my opinion. A similar example came up recently for the Mongolian currency, which you can find references to as tugrik, tughrik, tugrug, togrog, tögrög, and I'm sure even more.

  1. The spellings alef, bet, gimmel and dalet are, as far as I can tell, closer to modern hebrew romanization (actually, "gimmel" seems to be very obscure regardless). However, aleph, beth, gimel and daleth are almost universal in an academic setting, which is where these symbols are intended for.

A search for "alef" on arxiv brings up mostly a bunch of results relating to an author with the last name "Alef" https://arxiv.org/search/?query=alef&searchtype=all, while "aleph" has many relevant results https://arxiv.org/search/?query=aleph&searchtype=all (even excluding the matches to "\aleph").

This is similar to the situation with the greek letters, where "alfa" would have been preferred if we want by romanization.

  1. LaTeX uses \aleph, \beth, \gimel and \daleth

  2. HTML uses &aleph, &beth, &gimel and &daleth

@mkorje
Copy link
Collaborator

mkorje commented May 18, 2025

alef also conflicts with the Arabic letter, which we could add in the future along with the rest of the Arabic alphabet (after #20 is merged).

@MDLC01
Copy link
Collaborator

MDLC01 commented May 18, 2025

alef also conflicts with the Arabic letter, which we could add in the future along with the rest of the Arabic alphabet (after #20 is merged).

Ok this convinces me

@emilyyyylime
Copy link
Collaborator

I think this makes sense. Even in Israel in an academic setting you'd find 'aleph' more commonly than 'alef' I think.[citation needed]

@mkorje mkorje merged commit 9d0be52 into typst:main May 18, 2025
1 check passed
@MDLC01 MDLC01 added the breaking This involves a breaking change label May 20, 2025
@MDLC01
Copy link
Collaborator

MDLC01 commented May 20, 2025

I just realized that we should have waited for @laurmaedje's approval before merging this PR, as it plans a breaking change.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
breaking This involves a breaking change
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

4 participants