🚀 go-pugleaf

Sender: "Dick Schoeller, ZKO3-3/Y25  13-Aug-1993 0843" <schoeller@gooey.enet.dec.com>
Subject: RE: Consolidated Answers for "Hebrew Date"

Emmanuel Uren <76107.405@CompuServe.COM> wrote:

> I appreciate the responses to my previous question on the format of long
> Hebrew dates, but I see that I failed to make myself clear as to what we
> were looking for.  It boils down to this; do French Jews, Portuguese Jews,
> Spanish Jews use the same long date format when dealing with the Hebrew
> calendar transliterated into French, Portuguese, Spanish and so on?  Or do
>they use the same format as they do with the civil or Gregorian calendar?
>
>We can not use the Hebrew glyphs in Windows 3.1. localized for various
>Western European locales since the ANSI character set (is it 1252?) doesn't
>support those glyphs.  Furthermore, not all Jews (in the US at least) read
>Hebrew and so we are dealing with transliteration from Hebrew to French,
>Portuguese, Spanish, German and so on (not to mention American).

I will agree that not all Jews can read Hebrew (in the US most are illiterate
in Hebrew).  However, it is rare that a Jew that is concerned with Hebrew
calendar dates is incapabale of reading enough Hebrew to deal with them.  The
concern with the Hebrew name of the month generally goes hand in hand with
sufficient Hebrew to at least pronounce the month names.

As far as using Hebrew glyphs, just provide the font and make sure that you
are requesting the appropriate font for that information.  The fonts on a
default Windows 3.n installation are ANSI fonts which are identical to ISO
8859-1 character mapping.  If you can find a font to provide that is ISO 8859-8
for the Hebrew you should be all set.

If you are hard set on transliterating the month names, I would look at printed
Jewish calendars for the locales in question and see how they are normally done.
Most of the ones that I get have the Hebrew month name in both Hebrew and
transliteration.  All but one that I found around my house display the day
number for the Hebrew month using the numbering system based on Hebrew letters
rather than the arabic numerals.

In any case, text describing that the date is a Yahrzeit or a holiday should be
displayed in the local language.  Yahrzeit itself isn't even Hebrew, it's
Yiddish and Jews from Sephardic backgrounds might not even recognize the term.
(What's the Ladino for Yahrzeit?)

Dick