Aleph-umlaut

[Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode]

On 11/10/18 1:25 AM, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
>
> In the last pages of the text linked by Mark E. Shoulson, both the 
> gershayim and the aleph-umlaut are shown.  A quick look didn't find 
> any other base letter with the combining umlaut.
>
Indeed; there is no shortage of use of the GERSHAYIM, used as it 
normally is, to indicate abbreviations.  The umlaut on the alef is used 
specifically in the Yiddish parts, to be an umlaut (the word with the 
GERSHAYIM on the top line is an abbreviation for the phrase for a legal 
court or authority; the word on the second like transliterates 
apparently to "bestätigt"; someone with better German than me can make 
more sense of it.  The example I sent at first used the word 
"legalität", which even I can understand as "legality" or something like 
that.)  I think the Yiddish at the time may already not have had ö or ü 
sounds, so had no need to transliterate those (or maybe there just 
happened not to be a need for them in this text); certainly I see 
Yiddish spellings like אויפֿ־ ("oyf-") where German would have "auf".

~mark