BY LEE DEMBART | Wudn't Inglish luk stranj if it wer sudenly speld fonetikly?

A one-time major American newspaper is changing its spelling. And therein lies a tale of Talmudic proportions.

The Forward, once called The Jewish Daily Forward, is published in Yiddish. It celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. In its heyday, in the 1920s, it sold 250,000 copies a day, with editions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Boston. In fact, it was the first newspaper in any language to be published nationally in the United States. The Forward taught several generations of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe about America. Later, it published many of Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories and novels.

But the Holocaust in Europe and assimilation in this country nearly put an end to both Yiddish and the Forward. Before World War II, there were 11 million Yiddish speakers around the world. Now there are estimated to be perhaps 3 million, with relatively few young people. The 24-page Yiddish edition of the Forward is now published weekly and has but 8,000 subscribers. (The paper started a weekly edition in English several years ago, and it has 29,000 readers.)

The obituaries for Yiddish have been written many times, but the language continues to survive, though perhaps in extremis. Still, it's a sign of life (or something) that the spelling of Yiddish is a live and lively question. The Forward is one of the last Yiddish publications to adopt the so-called standard Yiddish orthography -- 60 years after it was proposed. But the debate isn't over yet.

To understand the passions stirred by this seemingly arcane dispute, you have to know something about Yiddish. The language grew up 1,000 years ago among Jews in German-speaking parts of Europe. It resembles German (about 80 percent of the vocabulary is recognizably German) and is completely different from Hebrew, though it is written in the Hebrew alphabet.

Hebrew for Jews was like Latin for Roman Catholics. After it stopped being a spoken language, it remained the language of prayer and scholarship. (In this century, the Zionists and Israel revived Hebrew as a spoken language, which is believed to be the only time that a dead language has ever been brought back to life. But that's another story.)

When the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe began to write down their language, they wrote it in the alphabet that they knew -- Hebrew. They were spelling German words in the Hebrew alphabet, and they kept the German spelling even after the pronunciation changed. Over time, there came to be a lot of silent letters in Yiddish.

For example, the Yiddish word zen (pronounced as in "Zen Buddhism") comes from the German word sehen and means "to see." For a long time, that word was spelled in Yiddish using the Hebrew letters for z-e-h-e-n even though the word was no longer pronounced that way.

More than a century ago, people began thinking about streamlining and rationalizing Yiddish spelling. Over the years, various ways to do it were investigated and proposed, and some were adopted or partially adopted. But partial spelling reform turned out to be no better than the previous regime: A chaotic situation resulted in which the spelling of Yiddish varied from publication to publication.

In the 1930s, the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research in Vilna (now Vilnius), Lithuania, promulgated an essentially phonetic spelling system for Yiddish that was quickly adopted by the literary and scholarly worlds. The YIVO system has become the standard Yiddish orthography. It is the one taught at some 60 colleges and universities in the United States that offer Yiddish. The word "zen" is now spelled with the Hebrew letters for z-e-n.

But the YIVO system was resisted by many Jews. "Most disputes in the Jewish world -- and probably in the world at large -- involve emotional involvement," says Mordecai Schechter, who teaches Yiddish at Columbia University and is executive director of the League for Yiddish. "Maybe among Jews more than among others." One of the main sources of friction was that the YIVO system came from Vilna, and there is long-standing rivalry between the Jews of Lithuania and the Jews of Poland. The Lithuanian Jews think the Polish Jews are country bumpkins, and the Polish Jews think the Lithuanian Jews are stuck-up snobs.

"There were some people in Warsaw who refused to be lorded over by YIVO scholars from Vilna," Samuel Norich, general manager of the Forward, said. "There is a story -- I don't know whether it's apocryphal or not -- that one of the Yiddish writers in Warsaw organized a group of vigilantes who took the train up to Vilna and threw rocks at the YIVO building."

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