Change the spelling of "Bereshit" to "Braisheet" (it looks bad)

[catalandres]

Transliterating Hebrew is a tough business as it is. And that is without counting the Sephardic-Ashkenazic divide. But it’s specially shitty (...see what I did there?) when one transliterates Hebrew to English, given that the latter has many ways to spell nearly each sound.

This was a problem when it came to think about how we would write the names of the parshiyot in the website.

I personally favor Sephardic/Israeli pronunciation, because it provides us the security and certainty that one gets when there is a linguistic authority backing it (it becomes easy to resort to the standard set by the Hebrew academy), which makes it easy to determine how a vowel will sound, which is the most problematic aspect of the differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazic pronunciation.

Unfortunately, once you enter the territory of traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation that becomes the Wild West of transliteration, specially because different Hassidic movements have different ways to understand (or, if you prefer, shred) how a vowel is actually pronounced. And then, of course, good luck projecting that diversity onto the maelstrom of English spelling.

The easy way out of this was to resort to someone else’s work. If someone else has done this before, we can piggyback their efforts. This is specially good if I had basically two consistent options for good Israeli-grade transliteration:

• The Koren Ḥumash, which follows to a good degree the transliteration rules of the Hebrew Academy, with particular emphasis in everything pertaining to gemination (that is, the “doubling” or elongation of long consonants), which provide us with parshiyot names as interestingly looking as “Vayyiggash” or “Beḥuqqotay”.
• The list of sedrot from HebCal, which is consistent and close enough to the HA transliteration rules, but it chills out when it comes to gemination and uses ASCII characters (the most prominent examples are ch instead of ḥ and ts instead of ẓ) that would render better if a browser (especially those in cell phones) does not have access to Unicode UTF8 character tables, which in this day and age may be problematic with a few old versions of Android.

Although I really like Koren’s consistency, I favored HebCal’s because Koren is too far from what everyone is used to.

Curiously enough, one thing in which both transliterations coincide is the spelling of the first parsha: ”Bereshit”. Not only that, if we go to Artscroll’s Stone Chumash that spelling becomes ”Bereishis”. That is, the last syllable is transliterated with a single “i”, because it’s a short “i” sound. Choosing “ee” as the grapheme that represents that sound would be ill-advised, because in English “ee” always represents some type of long “i” sound.

Finally, we have “Rabbeinu Google” to provide some statistics. Out of all the spellings that Wikipedia provides for the first parsha in Torah, “Bereshit” is the most widely used all over the world (full results, the numbers denote the number of results for each Google search as of August 19, 2016: “Bereshit”, 579,000; “Bereishit”, 207,000; “Bereishis”, 93,500; “B’reshith”, 3,850; “Beresheet”, 81,800; “Bereishees”, 6,660). A search for “braisheet” comes up with 228 results.

And this is why I am inclined to leave it as it is: it would be (a) inconsistent, (b) linguistically inaccurate and (c) unrecognizable to the users of the website if we used “Braisheet".

I will leave this ticket open on GitHub so that we can continue the discussion, but no immediate action will stem from it. I am nonetheless fully open to changing it if we can sufficiently and satisfactorily address those three points.

[RabbiEHirsch]

How do I put this mildly? People get offended and it looks awkward when a transliteration ends with a curse word. :)