I titled this post with a "one" even though I don't plan on doing a series because a major component of the specs for any product is usability, and for manuscripts that means
legibility so I'll probably be writing about it a lot. Last week I finally got around to getting certified as a sofer by the Vaad Mishmereth STa"M, the self-declared international regulatory body for scribes. (They used to do a lot of consumer protection seminars and things. Now they license sofrim under the assumption that if the scribe has an up-to-date license a consumer can trust him.) In true Israeli style this involved under one hour of testing and paperwork that blew up into a full-day ordeal thanks to travel time, waiting time, and another-two-hours-because-that's-how-we-do-things time. I can now compete with my friends' tzav rishon (Israeli draft board) stories.
Anyway, on to the topic. One of the questions on my written exam was "what if the leg of an ayin is horizontal and short?" I answered that it is passul (invalid) because it looks like a tet. No idea how they graded it, but I think I was justified the very next day while trying to read something in yeshiva.
This is one style of the font family commonly known as "rashi script." In fact this is the kind used in the older prints of books found in yeshiva libraries. Look at the tet and the ayin (the 9th and 19th letters going right to left); it wouldn't be too hard to confuse them if you didn't see them in the context of the whole alphabet in order.
Re "rashi script": I've seen it called "sephardic semi-cursive". Antique book places call it "rabbinic type".
ReplyDeleteThen there's the odd one that looks sort of like Rashi, but with Ashkenazic script mems, generally used for transliterated German (or Judish-Deutch, what Jews in Germany used instead of the more Hebraicized Yiddish), called Wayber-teitsch. But I don't know if that's from some designer named Weber, or because women's books (Wayber) were printed with it.
I've seen it called "sephardic cursive", "sephardic script" and several other variations of that name but most of my miniscule readership knows it as "Rashi Script" so I referred to it as such but with quotes because it isn't strictly accurate.
DeleteI don't know anything at all about Wayber-teitsch but I would guess your second idea is more likely because if the font was designed by someone named Weber it wouldn't be called "Weber's German" after the language but "Weber's Script" after the font.
Not saying you're incorrect in this instance - but as a side point, a kosher tzurat ha'ot in Stam is determined with respect to the way the Stam letters are written, not how they look in other scripts.
ReplyDeleteThe classic example is the mem stuma of Rashi and the samech in Stam. A tinok who would make the mistake in calling a samech a mem because he's familiar with Rashi would be a Pasul tinok.
Obviously, you're right. Kosher tzurat ha'ot has nothing to do with how it looks in other fonts. This was just a funny example of what a real shinui tzurah means, to the point that my chavrusa read the word ממעט as "m'matet"
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