Geresch and Gereshayim

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Geresch and Gereshayim are punctuation marks that mark abbreviations and other groups of letters in the Hebrew script that are not simply words. Their function is similar to that of the apostrophe in the Latin script, which Geresch is also similar in form. The word Gerschajim is the dual form of Geresch and describes two such characters that are situated next to one another and are taken together as one character. Geresch usually comes after a group of one or more letters; Gerzhayim always in a group of two or more letters before the last one.

Geresch and Gerschajim do not belong to the character set that is used in Bible texts, not even in vocalized and accented texts . But they were in use even before the revival of the Hebrew language in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Use of Geresh and Gereshayim

Abbreviations

Abbreviations that stand for a word that is shortened at the end are written with Geresch. If the abbreviation includes several words or if the last letter of a single word is retained, Gerschajim are used. The point is also used as a symbol for abbreviations. Examples:

abbreviation written out text meaning
ג׳ גרם g (grams)
וכו׳ וכולי etc.
עמ׳ עמוד S. (page)
ד״ר דוקטור Dr.
ז״ל זכרונו לברכה blessed memory
תנ״ך תורה נביאים כתובים hebrew bible

The resulting letter sequences are often pronounced as acronyms , e.g. B.תנ״ךas tenach or tanach .

numbers

When using Hebrew letters for numbers , Geresch is used for single-digit numbers and Gereschajim for multi-digit numbers. Example:תשמ״בis the number 742 or the year 5742 of the Jewish calendar (1981/82 according to the Gregorian calendar ). Numbers can also be pronounced as acronyms, e.g. B.תרי״ג(613, the number of the biblical commandments) as tarjag .

Transcriptions of strange sounds

Geresch is used to identify individual Hebrew letters that do not have the normal Hebrew sound value in foreign words. There are a few more for Arabic word transcription.

Spelling Sound value example German spelling
ג׳ dʒ ג׳ינס Jeans
ז׳ ʒ ז׳אן-ז׳אק רוסו Jean-Jacques Rousseau
צ׳ tʃ צ׳אד Chad
ת׳ θ הית׳רו Heathrow

Letter names

Often letter names are written with Gerzhayim to distinguish them from other words, so אל״ף (Alef) from אלף (thousand) or בי״ת (Bet) of בית (House).

Character encoding

׳
 Unicode codepoint U + 05F3
Unicode name HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERESH
HTML & # 1523;
ISO 8859-8 missing, replacement with 0x27
Windows 1255 0xD7
״
 Unicode codepoint U + 05F4
Unicode name HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERSHAYIM
HTML & # 1524;
ISO 8859-8 missing, replacement with 0x22
Windows 1255 0xD8

The replacement of Geresch and Gereshayim by the ASCII characters apostrophe and quotation marks also occurs in texts that are encoded with a character set that contains Geresh and Gereshayim, for example in the lemmas of the Hebrew Wikipedia.

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