Information About the UYIP Mailing List Mark H. David May 24, 1996 Revised Nov. 22, 1998 Revised Dec. 23, 2000 Revised Mar. 15, 2004 The UYIP mailing list is for Understanding Yiddish Information Processing. This list is primarily for people interested in discussing and learning the technical details of using computers for various aspects of processing information in the Yiddish language, as well as such related topics as Yiddish computer terminology and using Yiddish on the Internet. First, a bit of administrative trivia. To subscribe or unsubscribe at any time, send an email message to uyip-request@world.std.com and leave the subject blank, and just put the following text as the body of the message: subscribe to subscribe, and unsubscribe to unsubscribe. Note that, for those new to Internet mailing lists, "subscribing" to a mailing list does not cost any money. Note that only email from subscribed persons will be accepted on the list. Other email will automatically be returned to the sender. Also, if your email address stops working, you may be automatically removed from the list; if this happens by mistake, just subscribe again. As time goes on, more information gets incorporated into the UYIP Home Page at http://www.uyip.org where frequently asked questions (FAQs) are answered, and links are given to all sorts of resources related to Yiddish information processing. This list will be pleased to accept postings in either transliterated Yiddish or English. All messages should be in plain ASCII text. Please do not send attachments to the list, and do not send non-ASCII (English-alphabet) messages to this list. With time, hopefully we'll all be sending messages in Yiddish letters, but that time is not yet here, and when it arrives we'll update the document you're reading. We do hope at some point to create a way to supply documents and/or email to allow others to test them -- watch for announcements on UYIP and/or on the web page. For now, people can arrange via the list to email or otherwise transmit non-ASCII text documents. Discussion may at times become arbitrarily technical, and no limit is set on the amount of specialization. We hope to attract specialists and implementors of computer systems, who may wish to sample the waters for a short time to get feedback and useful information on programs and systems they are designing. Topics will include: character set standards; keyboard standards; fonts; Unicode/ISO 10646, HTML; SGML; collation standards and guidelines; bibliographic standards; orthographic standards; guidelines for localization to Yiddish (alevay!); coping with systems localized for Hebrew or English; utilities and standards for transforming documents from transliterated Roman to Hebrew script, and for character set and document transformation; online dictionaries and thesauruses; reviews of software packages and systems, such as word processors, language kits, etc., online dictionaries (alevay!), etc.; Yiddish terminology for information processing. The Yiddish language is written using the Hebrew script. Most of the work in getting Yiddish onto computers has come as a result of getting Hebrew, generally modern Hebrew, the language, onto computers. This has been important in getting us roughly 80% of the way "there" -- it gets us computers that can handle mixed right-to-left and left-to-right writing; it gets us fonts with Hebrew letters, and most if not all of the "glyphs" (character images) needed to represent the letter/nikud combinations required for writing Yiddish according to Standardized Yiddish Orthography. It gets us special keyboards for entering most if not all of our letter/nikud combinations. Etc. There is at least one very good list for discussion of all things Hebrew, including discussion generally of usage of the Hebrew script. It is fine for certain general discussion Yiddish information processing to happen there, but a smaller, more specialized list is more appropriate, and comfortable, for us who want to dive into the gory details. Relationship to other mailing lists: ILAN-H concerns itself in principle with all aspects of using the Hebrew script. ILAN-H is in practice mostly concerned with usage of the Hebrew script for the Hebrew language, and the majority if its membership know little or nothing about Yiddish. Hebrew Computing (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hebrewcomputing/) is similar to ILAN-H in that it's concerned with all aspects of using the Hebrew script. It's a newer group, and is quite a bit more active. It has an associated web site and download site. Mendele is for discussion of Yiddish Language and Literature. Most of its members know little or nothing about computers and have little interest in deciding how to get them to process Yiddish. When consensus is reached from our discussions, or when wider input is sought, it may be appropriate for summaries or questionaires to be crossposted to these other lists. However, in general, readers of these other lists should not be expected to be interested in our discussions. The moderator is Mark H. David. He produces the Yiddish language radio show, "Dos Yidishe Kol", information about which is available at http://www.yv.org/. In 1995 he represented the Committee for the Implementation of Standardized Yiddish Othography and the YIVO Institute by presenting a proposal for the addition of a character to the Unicode character set (khirek yud), which has since gained approval for inclusion in Unicode. Professionally, he is employed as a software developer for Gensym Corporation, where he had been responsible for, among other things, programming language design, internationalization, localization, parsing, editing, character sets, text processing, and other aspects of natural language processing. Posting address: uyip@world.std.com Request address: uyip-request@world.std.com Owner/Moderator's address: owner-uyip@world.std.com UYIP Web Page: http://www.uyip.org