> Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:08:12 -0400 > From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]> > List-software: Ecartis version 1.0.0 > > I think the issue here is (probably) a matter of legacy encodings, > though someone else would need to confirm that.
I see another possible explanation. Yiddish is in some sense a transliteration of old German with Hebrew letters. In German, as in many other European languages, vowels are letters on their own right, not just diacriticals written above or below the consonants. These digraphs, as well as U+FB2E etc., could be an attempt to have separate characters that correspond to German vowels, as opposed to having pairs of characters to express those vowels.
