Karmelitic Script

The Karmelitic Script, known as "HaKtav HaKarmeli" (הכתב הכרמלי) in Hebrew, is a system to transliterate Hebrew words in Latin letters.

The problems

The Asiryan Script, used in modern Hebrew, is quite outdated and represents the state of lingual developments about two thousands years ago.

To begin with, unlike the majority of modern languages:

• It's written right-to-left,
• It lacks vowels, having Nikud (a sort of diacritic marks) instead. The marks aren't used daily writing, making spelled words ambiguous unless you know them.
• It has pairs of letters with similar pronouncation. A large part of the population can no longer distinguish them, while others, especially people of oriental origins can still catch the subtle difference.
• It has "final character" variants for some letters, which is a legacy from times when words weren't separated by spaces.

The solution

The answer to this, according to Dr. Michael Avinor, would be The Kamelitic Script. This script throws away the antique Asyrian alphabet, using the Latin alphabet instead. The new script attempts to clarify the language while retaining all of its "herritage".

For example:

• Accents are represented by double letters (e.g. 'tt' for accented 't').
• Nikud marks are represented by Latin vowels.
• "Redundant" letters are retained (retaining language integrity; also a cultural issue in Israel -- only population of certain origins can really pronounce the difference between the "redundant" letters, and claiming those letters as redundant would offend them) and represented using custom non-Latin glyphs. Read more in TheLady's Hebrew alphabet writeup.

The system was promoted by its supporters to solve difficulties in:

• Learning the language
  Mandatory vowels will prevent word ambiguities.
• Writing scientific works
  Simplify mixing of mathematical expressions and foreign text with Hebrew; transliterating Hebrew scientific terms.
• Poetry
  Allowing writers to improvise with words, without fearing of not being understood.
• Computing
  BiDi support complicates computer applications; in an article about the Karmelitic script in a computer magazine from around 1984, the author even brought the example of "China's struggle to develop hampered by the language barrier".

Today

The system was indeed a reasonable idea, but traditions are hard to change, and so it was left with few supporters (see http://www.karmeli.org) and no adoption. Israel, as of today, did end up beyond the language barrier (mostly thanks to Microsoft's solutions).

On a personal note, my grandma still can't cope with "that horrible Hebrew", saying how Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the revival of modern Hebrew, shoud've taken Yiddish as an example instead.

Materials

• http://www.snunit.k12.il/heb_journals/mada/255240.html (Hebrew; article about the Karmelitic Script)
• http://www.karmeli.org (The Karmeli Alphabet; site by supporters of this writing system)