LonelyJar wrote:
Sorry for bumping an old thread, but I think I know why the tattoo is so hard to read. Maybe the tattoo isn't a Hebrew word at all, but something written in a similar language (Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, etc.). Does this help shed some light on the mystery?
Don't know about the others.
But it could be Yiddish because historically Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet.
Yiddish is a naturally evolved language spoken by the Jews of Eastern Europe. Basically medeaval German spoken by Jews as they migrated past Germany into the Slavic countries farther east during the middle ages. And it became the lingua franca for Jew to communicate with each other between their communities scatterd across Russia and eastern Europe. Then during the 19th century a bunch of rabbis and scholars got together to make Yiddish into a written language- so they figured out how to transcribe the sounds of Yiddish (a Germanic language unrelated to Hebrew)into the Hebrew alphabet (so it could be used in newspapers etc).