Daniel's got a whole thing about road signs this week. The Academy of the Hebrew Language is being brought in by the Prime Minister's Office to standardize how Israeli place names get written in English, because right now the same city can show up three different ways within ten kilometers. He wants to know why the different schools of transliteration emerged, how Israel has wrestled with this over the years, and what the Academy actually does with all its outsized authority over the language. And he admits he's quietly delighted by spellings like Tiqwa with a Q, even though nobody pronounces it that way.
The Q. It always comes back to the Q.
It's the shibboleth of Israeli road signage. You see Petah Tiqwa and you know someone at the Public Works Department had a very strong opinion in 1987 and nobody's been able to dislodge it since.
The wild thing is the Academy already killed the Q twenty years ago. The 2006 reform explicitly replaced kuf with K, and the UN adopted it in 2007. Bnei Brak instead of Bene Beraq. Ashkelon instead of Ashqelon. And yet here we are in 2026, and the signs still say Tiqwa.
Which tells you the problem was never the absence of a rule. It's that nobody with a sign budget was required to follow it.
That's exactly what the Academy's scientific secretary said at the Knesset hearings a few years back. She called it a problem of implementation, not rules. The Transport Ministry had fifteen years to fix it and couldn't.
So now the Prime Minister's Office is spending a quarter million shekels to have the Academy do it properly. That's about eighty-four thousand dollars to settle how to spell Petah Tikva.
And the work runs from October this year to October next year. Objections accepted until Thursday.
Thursday. So if you have strong feelings about the Q, you have three days.
I wonder how many objections they'll get. This is the kind of thing people feel very personally about. There was a letter to the editor years ago, resurfaced by Haaretz, from a man named Eitan Arbel, who wrote that someone at the Public Works Department was desperately in love with the letter Q. He listed Yarqon versus Yarkon, Elyaqim versus Elyakim, Mevaseret Ziyyon versus Zion.
Desperately in love with the letter Q is a fantastic diagnosis. It's a romance that's been going on since the British Mandate.
The British published the first official trilingual list of geographical names in 1930. Hebrew, Arabic, Latin script. And from day one there was a split between people who wanted to represent the Hebrew letters faithfully and people who wanted the English to actually sound like the place name.
And those two goals pull in opposite directions. The letter kuf, that's the Q, it's a letter that in biblical Hebrew was pronounced further back in the throat, more like the Arabic qaf. So if you want letter fidelity, you write Q. If you want a tourist to say the name and be understood, you write K, because no English speaker sees Q and thinks this is just a K sound.
Right, the Q in English almost always comes with a U after it and makes a kw sound. Queen, quick, quiet. So Tiqwa, an English speaker looks at that and wants to say tik-wah. Which is actually not far off, but it's not how anyone says it.
Daniel's point exactly. He loves the Q because it's a stubborn little fossil of how the word might have been rendered a century ago. But it's not a living pronunciation.
The Academy's own stated principle is that transliteration should reflect pronunciation, not spelling. That's their published position. So by their own logic, Tiqwa is wrong. It's a spelling that preserves a historical letter distinction that modern Hebrew speakers don't make.
And yet it persists on signs. Which is the whole story in miniature. The Academy has rules, the rules say one thing, and the actual physical infrastructure of the country says something else.
Let me trace how we got here, because the history is strange. The Academy published its first romanization rules in 1957. The UN recommended them in 1977. Those rules were very letter-faithful. Q for kuf, W for vav. So you got forms like Qesariyya.
Qesariyya. That's Caesarea. Which nobody calls Qesariyya except maybe a very determined librarian.
And the problem became obvious. In 1995, the Education Minister at the time, Amnon Rubinstein, asked for a review because forms like Petah Tiqwa and Qesariyya were working terribly as road names. Foreigners couldn't read them, couldn't pronounce them, couldn't match them to what their GPS said.
So they actually ran an empirical test. Two hundred twenty tourists who didn't read Hebrew were shown Latinized place names and asked to pronounce them. Researchers analyzed fifty-five hundred recordings.
Fifty-five hundred recordings of tourists mangling Qesariyya. I would love to hear that archive.
That's the most Israeli thing possible. We will settle this with a controlled experiment and then ignore the results for another decade.
The results fed into the 2006 reform. Vav became V instead of W, kuf became K instead of Q, tsadi became Ts, and they dropped the automatic E for silent shva. So Bene Beraq became Bnei Brak.
Which is how people actually say it.
The reform was about readability. And then the UN adopted it in 2007, so internationally that's the recognized system.
But the signs didn't change.
Some did. A lot didn't. And then in 2009, the Transport Minister at the time, Yisrael Katz, decided to make it political. He ordered road signs changed so that English and Arabic names directly transliterated the Hebrew. Jerusalem would become Yerushalayim. Nazareth would become Natsrat. Caesarea would become Kesariya.
That's not a transliteration project, that's a sovereignty project.
He said it out loud. He said he would not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al-Quds. That was the quote.
And the Arab members of Knesset responded that al-Quds would remain al-Quds and Shefa-Amr would remain Shefa-Amr no matter what the sign said.
The Minority Affairs Minister at the time, Avishay Braverman, said road signs are not a political issue. Which is a lovely thing to say about something that had just become completely political.
So you have two separate fights happening on the same piece of metal. One about whether the Q survives, and one about whose language gets to name the place at all.
And they get tangled. Because the 2012 government decision tried to settle the politics with a basic rule plus exceptions model. Jewish settlement names get transliterated from Hebrew. Arab settlement names get transliterated from Arabic. And historical exonyms stay as they are. Jerusalem, Jaffa, Acre, Nablus, Caesarea.
So Jerusalem stays Jerusalem, not Yerushalayim. Which makes sense. Nobody is going to start writing Yerushalayim on the highway signs and expect tourists to find the Old City.
But it also means the system is inherently inconsistent. You have a rule, and then you have a list of exceptions, and then you have exceptions to the exceptions. And every exception is a place where someone's identity is being negotiated.
The exonym thing is interesting on its own. Jerusalem is an exonym, a traditional English name for the city that doesn't match the local pronunciation. Yerushalayim. But English has been saying Jerusalem for a thousand years. Same with Jaffa for Yafo, Acre for Akko.
And the question is always where you draw the line. Caesarea is an exonym, but Kesariya is what Israelis call it. The 2009 Katz order wanted Kesariya. The 2012 decision said no, keep Caesarea. So the sign says Caesarea, and everyone is mildly annoyed.
Mildly annoyed is the natural state of Israeli road signage.
Here's the part I find interesting, because it connects to what Daniel is actually asking about. Why did different practices emerge in the first place? It's not just bureaucracy. It's that different communities brought different traditions for rendering Hebrew letters in Latin script.
The German and Yiddish influence gives you CH for the letter chet. So you get chutzpah, challah. The Mizrahi tradition, and the ancient pronunciation, gives you H with a dot under it, or just H. And the academic tradition gives you H with a line under it that nobody can type.
And for kuf, the letter in question, you have Isaac with a C, because that came through Greek and Latin. Yitzhak with a K, because that's the modern Israeli way. And Qehila with a Q, because that's the academic letter-faithful way. Three different letters for the same Hebrew letter.
So when the state sits down to standardize, it's not choosing between right and wrong. It's choosing which diaspora gets to be the official one.
And the Academy has tried to split the difference by having two systems. A simple transliteration for popular use, street signs and ads, and a precise system for catalogs and title pages. They call it two jobs, not two competing standards.
Which is a very Academy way to frame it. We're not inconsistent, we're just doing two jobs.
But the two jobs bleed into each other. A road sign is the popular use. A government database is the precise use. When the database feeds the sign, or the sign feeds the database, you get chaos.
And the geolocation angle Daniel raised is where this stops being a niche aesthetic debate. If your mapping algorithm expects one standardized string for a place name, and the sign says Petah Tiqwa but the Interior Ministry database says Petah Tikva and the railway app says Petakh Tikva, the algorithm has to treat those as three different places.
Or it has to run fuzzy matching, and fuzzy matching introduces its own errors. There's a town called Masada, and apparently at one point a sign in Arabic rendered it in a way that read as the word for restaurant.
So you're driving to the ancient fortress and you end up at a falafel stand.
That's the implementation problem. The Government Names Committee has approved over four thousand Hebrew names since Ben-Gurion set it up in 1949. But approval isn't the same as a machine-readable database that every ministry actually uses.
And the data portal, data dot gov dot il, the state's own open data site, disclaims accuracy on this. The Interior Ministry, the Transport Ministry, the Cartographic Center, the railway, the municipalities, they each hold their own spellings. Five databases, five versions of the truth.
So what the Academy is being paid to do now is not invent new rules. The rules exist. It's to map the existing mess, collect examples from official documents and public information systems, identify the inconsistencies, and produce a final updated list of official place names that everyone is supposed to use.
That's a data governance project wearing a linguistics costume.
It really is. The Academy president, Moshe Bar-Asher, said at the Knesset hearings that state institutions have ignored Academy decisions for years, concerning tens of thousands of names. Tens of thousands.
So the Academy has the authority on paper. The 1953 law that established it says its decisions are binding on all government bodies. And yet the government bodies have been cheerfully ignoring it for decades.
The law is actually fascinating. The Academy was set up by an act of Knesset in 1953, succeeding the Hebrew Language Committee founded by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in 1890. It determines official Hebrew terminology, grammar, orthography, punctuation, and transliteration. Its decisions appear in the official gazette and are binding.
Binding. That's the word in the law.
And yet the Transport Ministry has been running its own show for years. There was a bill in 2021 by MK Eitan Ginzburg to make the Academy the authority on public place name spelling and create a public database. It passed a preliminary reading thirty-three to zero.
Thirty-three to zero. Unanimous. And then what?
And then nothing, as far as I can tell. It didn't become law. Which is why the PMO is now doing this through a procurement contract instead of legislation.
A quarter million shekels is cheaper than a law, and you don't need sixty-one votes.
And you get to say you're doing something about the spelling chaos without actually changing anyone's legal authority.
Let me ask the question Daniel is really circling. Why does he love the Q? He says he laments the phonological contraction of Hebrew in its modern form, and he's quietly delighted to see Tiqwa. What's actually going on there?
I think it's the same instinct that makes people enjoy seeing thou in old English or ye olde on a pub sign. The Q is a marker of depth. It says this word has a history, it wasn't always pronounced the way it is now, there's a letter here that used to mean something different.
The Q is the Hebrew language's way of keeping a portrait of its great-grandparents on the wall.
And the Academy's 2006 reform was, from that perspective, a kind of modernization. It said we're going to write the language the way people actually speak it, not the way it was spoken three thousand years ago. And a certain kind of traditionalist feels that as a loss.
Even though the Academy is the prescriptivist institution. It's the one that tells people how to speak. And here it is saying, actually, for transliteration, we're going to follow the living pronunciation, not the ancient letters.
Which is a really interesting reversal. The Academy is usually the conservative force. It invents Hebrew words for telephone and computer and television. It tries to keep the language pure. But on transliteration, it's the modernizer, because it wants foreigners to be able to read the signs.
And the traditionalist position on transliteration is held by people who in every other context would be the modernizers. The tech people, the people building mapping apps, they want consistency, but they also sometimes want the Q because it's distinctive.
There's a professor, Uzi Ornan, who was an Academy member, and he denounced the 2006 reform as, quote, nothing but a capitulation to a foreign language, and to the English language. Political capitulation. He said transliteration cannot be, and needn't serve as, a phonetic guide for those who don't know our language.
So his position is that the English on the sign is not for the English speaker. It's for the Hebrew speaker who wants to see their language represented faithfully in Latin letters.
And that's a coherent position. It's just not the position of anyone who has ever been lost in Petah Tikva.
Or Petah Tiqwa. Depending on which exit you took.
The empirical test with the tourists is the counter to Ornan. They recorded fifty-five hundred pronunciations. The evidence says that when you write Qesariyya, foreigners cannot say it. When you write Kesariya, they can. If the sign is for the foreigner, the Q has to go.
But the sign is never just for the foreigner. That's the whole tension. The sign is also a statement about what the place is called, and who gets to decide.
The 2009 Katz episode made that explicit. He wasn't trying to help tourists. He was trying to assert that the Hebrew name is the real name, and the English and Arabic are just translations of it.
And the response from Arab MKs was that the Arabic name is the real name, and the Hebrew is the translation. Both sides understood that a road sign is a claim.
The 2012 compromise was supposed to end that fight by saying Jewish towns from Hebrew, Arab towns from Arabic, famous places keep their exonyms. And mostly it has held. But the underlying question never went away.
Because the underlying question is whether Israel is a state with one national language that happens to have minorities, or a state with multiple languages that share the landscape.
And that's a question no transliteration committee can answer. They can only pick a spelling.
Let me pull on the thread of the Academy's outsized importance, because Daniel asked about that specifically. This is an institution that was founded before the state. The Hebrew Language Committee started in 1890, when Hebrew was still mostly a written language, not a spoken one.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's project. He needed words for everyday things. The committee coined thirty thousand terms in sixty subject areas before the state even existed. Words for ice cream, for bicycle, for newspaper.
So the Academy inherits this incredible founding myth. It's the institution that made Hebrew speakable again. And that gives it a moral authority that no other language regulator has.
The French Academy wishes it had this kind of origin story. The French Academy is just a bunch of old men in suits deciding that email is going to be called courriel. The Hebrew Academy revived a language from the dead.
And it means that when the Academy says a word is official, it carries weight far beyond what a government decree would.
Even when people ignore it. Which they do constantly. The Academy invents a Hebrew word for smartphone, and everyone just says smartfon. The Academy says the proper plural of this or that, and people say what they say.
So the Academy has this paradox at its core. It's the most authoritative language institution in the world, and it's also constantly losing to actual usage.
And transliteration is the one place where its authority could actually be enforced, because it's the one place where the state has to print things. You can't make people say smartfon, but you can make the highway department print Petah Tikva.
If the highway department agrees to listen.
Which it hasn't, consistently, for fifty years.
So what does the new project actually change? If the Academy produces a final list in October 2027, what happens then?
The hope is that the list gets embedded in the government databases, and the databases feed the mapping apps, and the mapping apps feed the navigation systems, and eventually the signs get replaced to match. But the Transport Ministry has said replacing the sign array would take at least ten years.
Ten years of signs saying Tiqwa while the database says Tikva.
And every one of those signs is a little monument to the old system. A fossil.
Daniel would like that. He gets ten more years of Q sightings.
He gets to enjoy the Q on the road while the bureaucrats sort out the database. Best of both worlds.
There's something almost poignant about it. The Q is going to die, officially, and yet it will linger on the physical infrastructure for a decade or more. Like a language that's extinct but still written on the walls.
And the reason it lingers is practical. Signs cost money. A highway sign is a few thousand shekels. You don't replace them until they wear out or the intersection changes. So the old spelling just sits there, aging.
The half-life of a transliteration is the half-life of a road sign.
It means that even after the Academy settles this, the chaos will continue for years. The new standard will coexist with the old standard, and the mapping algorithms will still have to handle both.
Which is why the real deliverable here isn't the spelling. It's the database. If the Academy produces a clean, authoritative, machine-readable list of official place names, the apps can use that as a reference layer even while the signs catch up.
And that's the part the reporting tends to miss. The headline is always about the Q, because the Q is funny and concrete. But the actual work is building a canonical dataset that five different ministries agree to use.
The Q is the mascot for a data governance problem.
And the data governance problem is hard. You need an inter-ministerial team, which they have. You need to map existing spellings at national and local levels, which is the first phase. Then you identify inconsistencies and errors. Then you formulate a uniform procedure and a final list.
And the list only covers existing names. New place names are handled separately by the consultant they hired earlier this year for twenty-six thousand shekels.
Right, there was a separate contract in February for a transliteration consultant. So the Academy is getting paid twice. Once for the consultant, once for the big standardization project.
Total bill, about a hundred ten thousand dollars. To settle how to spell things.
Which sounds like a lot until you think about the cost of every tourist who misses their exit because the sign and the GPS disagree.
Or every emergency call where the dispatcher can't find the town because the caller is reading a sign that doesn't match the database.
That's the stakes, actually. It's not just tourism. It's ambulances, fire trucks, police. If the mapping data doesn't match the physical signage, first responders lose minutes.
The Q is not just a nostalgic indulgence. It's a public safety issue.
That's the thing Daniel is getting at when he says the lack of standardization causes genuine problems. It's easy to laugh at the Q, but the Q is a symptom of a system where nobody's database agrees with anybody else's.
The Academy is the only institution with enough moral authority to knock heads together. The PMO can't do it alone, the Transport Ministry has its own agenda, the municipalities are all doing their own thing. The Academy is the one body that everyone sort of agrees should be in charge, even if they ignore it.
Sort of agrees. And now they're being paid to actually do the job, with a deadline and a deliverable.
The Academy is being hired to solve a problem it technically already had the authority to solve, but couldn't enforce.
The contract is a way of buying enforcement. You pay the Academy, it becomes a procurement relationship, and procurement relationships have teeth in a way that statutory authority apparently doesn't.
Bureaucracy in its purest form. We couldn't make them listen to us, so we'll pay them to listen to us.
You know what, it might actually work. A paid deliverable with a deadline is different from an open-ended mandate. The Academy has to produce something by October 2027.
Whether anyone uses it is the next question.
That's the next question. And it's the question that's been asked since 1957.
Let me come back to Daniel's delight in the Q, because I think there's something worth naming. He says he laments the phonological contraction of Hebrew. The modern language has collapsed distinctions that used to be meaningful. Kuf and kaf are now the same sound. Tet and tav are the same. Alef and ayin are mostly the same.
Chet and khaf are merging too, in a lot of speakers. The guttural sounds are fading. Modern Hebrew is a much flatter phonological landscape than biblical Hebrew.
The Q on the sign is a little rebellion against that flattening. It says, this letter used to be different, and we're going to keep a trace of it in English even though Hebrew itself has given up.
The English transliteration becomes more conservative than the Hebrew it's transliterating. That's the weird part. The Hebrew word is tikva, with a kaf, and everyone says it the same way. The English word Tiqwa preserves a distinction that no longer exists in the source language.
It's a fossil. A trace fossil. The Q is a footprint of a sound that Hebrew stopped making centuries ago.
That's why the Academy's pronunciation principle argues against it. If you're transliterating the living language, you write K. If you're transliterating the historical language, you write Q. The Academy has chosen the living language.
Daniel is on the side of the historical language, aesthetically. He knows it's not how anyone speaks. He said as much. But he likes the stubbornness of it.
There's a whole school of thought that says transliteration should be reversible. That you should be able to look at the Latin script and reconstruct the exact Hebrew letters. That's the letter-faithful school. And under that school, Q is correct, because it tells you the letter was kuf, not kaf.
Reversibility is a real design goal in transliteration systems. It matters for libraries, for academic citations, for anything where you need to get back to the original.
It's completely irrelevant for a road sign. Nobody is driving down Route 4 trying to reconstruct the Hebrew letters from the English sign.
The two jobs really are different. The library job wants reversibility. The road sign job wants readability. And the Academy is trying to serve both with one institution.
The road sign job won, in 2006. The library job is still there for the people who need it. But the public-facing standard is pronunciation-based.
Which is why the Q is going to lose, eventually. It's already lost on paper. It just hasn't lost on the signs yet.
When it does lose on the signs, Daniel will have to find a new quiet delight. Maybe the H with a dot under it.
The dot under the H is even more doomed than the Q. Nobody can type it.
There's a whole subgenre of transliteration that uses diacritics, dots and lines under letters, to represent the distinctions. It's beautiful and precise and completely unusable for anything except academic papers.
The road sign version of that is the apostrophe. You see it in names like Be'er Sheva. The apostrophe is doing the work of the alef, marking a glottal stop that most speakers barely pronounce.
The 2006 reform changed the apostrophe rules too. It's a whole thing. The point is that every system makes tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs are never neutral.
The apostrophe is its own fight. Some systems use it, some don't, some use a different mark entirely. And every choice annoys someone.
The Central Bureau of Statistics uses Zefat. The Ministry of Aliyah uses tzfat with a TZ. English tradition uses Safed. Three different renderings of the same city, all inside the same government.
Safed is the exonym. Zefat is the pronunciation-based transliteration. Tzfat is the letter-faithful version. And they're all defensible.
That's the problem in a nutshell. Every spelling is defensible under some system, and the systems never agree.
What does the Academy actually do, in practice, when it sits down to make this list? How do you choose between three defensible spellings?
I think you have to pick a principle and then apply it consistently, even when it produces results that look wrong to someone. The 2006 system is pronunciation-based, so you pick Zefat, because that's how Israelis say it. And you accept that English tradition loses.
But then you have Jerusalem, which is not how Israelis say it. Israelis say Yerushalayim. So the pronunciation principle has an exception for famous exonyms.
The exception is huge. Jerusalem, Jaffa, Acre, Nablus, Caesarea, the Sea of Galilee. These are the names tourists actually know. If you transliterated them all phonetically, you'd have Yerushalayim, Yafo, Akko, Shekhem, Kesariya, Yam Kinneret.
The tourists would be completely lost. They came to see Jerusalem, not Yerushalayim.
The system is pronunciation-based except where it isn't. And the exceptions are the places that matter most for tourism.
Which is the pragmatic compromise. Keep the famous names in their English forms, transliterate everything else from the local pronunciation.
That's the 2012 model. Jewish towns from Hebrew, Arab towns from Arabic, famous exonyms preserved.
The thing I keep thinking about is that this whole project is happening because of algorithms. Daniel said it. The geolocation angle. The mapping apps need standardized strings. And it's strange that a debate that started with the British in 1930 is now being settled because a machine learning model can't handle three spellings of the same town.
The algorithm is the new tourist. The tourist can ask a local. The algorithm just fails silently.
The algorithm is less forgiving than the tourist. A tourist sees Petah Tiqwa and Petah Tikva and figures it out. The algorithm sees two different strings and treats them as two different entities.
Unless someone builds a fuzzy matching layer, and then the fuzzy matching introduces its own errors. There's no clean solution.
The Academy is being asked to be the clean solution. To produce the canonical string that all the algorithms can use.
That's a new role for the Academy. It's not just about language anymore. It's about data infrastructure.
The Academy as a data standards body. That's the future no one predicted in 1953.
It makes sense, actually. The Academy has the linguistic authority, and the data problem is fundamentally a linguistic problem. It's just being solved with databases instead of dictionaries.
I want to hear what Hilbert thinks about all this.
Hilbert: The Q is fine.
That's a strong opening.
Hilbert: My cousin worked for the Public Works Department. The sign shop. He was the one who ordered the letters. He said the Q was never about linguistics. It was about the template they had. The old template had Qs in it, and nobody wanted to pay for a new template.
The Q survived because of a template.
Hilbert: That's what he said. The new template came in around 2008, after the reform, and it had Ks. But the old signs were still up, and they stayed up because the budget for replacement was nothing. So the Q just sat there for another twenty years.
The half-life of a road sign.
Hilbert: He said the real problem was the database. The sign shop had a list of names, and the list came from the Cartographic Center, and the Cartographic Center had its own list, and the Interior Ministry had a different list. Three lists, and they only agreed about half the time.
Nobody was in charge of reconciling them.
Hilbert: There was a man in the Cartographic Center who tried. Aviel something. He was killed in a bombing in 2002. The whole reconciliation project stopped for three years.
That's the part of the story that doesn't make the headlines. The human cost.
Hilbert: My cousin said the man was the only one who understood how all three lists fit together. When he died, the knowledge died with him. They had to start over.
That's why the Academy is being brought in now. To rebuild that knowledge, but this time as a database that doesn't depend on one person.
Hilbert: My cousin said the Academy people are fine. He met a few of them. They know their stuff. But they don't know the signs. They know the language. The signs are a different thing. The signs are what happens when the language meets a budget.
A template with Qs in it.
Hilbert: A template with Qs in it. He said don't trust the Academy to fix the signs. Trust them to fix the list. The signs will fix themselves when the old ones fall down.
That's probably the realistic timeline. Ten years, maybe fifteen.
Hilbert: My cousin retired in 2019. He said the Q would outlive him. He was right.
The Q is not a linguistic fossil. It's a procurement fossil.
Hilbert: Same thing, in the end. Somebody made a decision in 1970, and the decision is still on the road because nobody paid to change it.
That's the whole story of Israeli infrastructure, really. Decisions outlive their budgets.
Hilbert: My cousin had a sign in his garage. Petah Tiqwa. He took it home when they replaced it. Said it was the last one with a Q.
Of course he did.
Hilbert: He said the Q was beautiful. He didn't care about the pronunciation. He just liked the shape of it.
There's something to that. The Q is a handsome letter. It has a tail.
Hilbert: He said the same thing. The tail. You don't get a tail with a K.
The Q has its defenders, and they're not all philologists.
Hilbert: Most of them aren't. Most of them are just people who drove past the sign for forty years and got used to it.
The familiarity argument is real. People bond with the spelling they grew up with, even if it's technically wrong.
Hilbert: My cousin said the worst thing about the reform was that Bnei Brak looks naked without the Q. Bene Beraq had weight. Bnei Brak looks like a typo.
That's the traditionalist position in one sentence.
Hilbert: He wasn't a traditionalist. He was a sign man. He just knew what looked right on a green background.
That's a completely different axis of judgment. Not phonetic, not philological. Aesthetic.
Hilbert: The road is an aesthetic medium. People forget that. The sign has to look right, not just be right.
The Academy is fighting a three-front war. Phonetics, philology, and aesthetics.
Hilbert: The budget. Four fronts. The budget is the one that wins.
The budget is always the one that wins.
Hilbert: My cousin said the whole thing would have been solved in 1990 if they'd just picked one list and forced everyone to use it. But nobody wanted to be forced. So they all kept their own lists, and the signs kept their Qs, and here we are.
Here we are, paying a quarter million shekels to do what they could have done for free in 1990.
Hilbert: Cheaper than replacing all the signs. That's what they told the Knesset. Ten years of sign replacement costs more than the Academy contract.
The contract is the cheap option.
Hilbert: The contract is the cheap option. That's the whole story of government. Do the cheap thing now, do the expensive thing later, and call it progress.
I think that's a good place to leave it.
Hilbert: My cousin would say the Q was never the problem. The problem was that nobody wanted to be the one to make the decision. The Q was just the excuse.
That's a sharper summary than most of the coverage.
Hilbert: He was a sharp man. He could read a sign at ninety kilometers an hour and tell you if the kerning was off.
The kerning.
Hilbert: The spacing between the letters. Most of the old signs were hand-spaced. The new ones are machine-cut. The machine-cut ones are too even. They look dead.
The aesthetic argument cuts both ways. The old signs had character.
Hilbert: The old signs had a man with a ruler. The new signs have a computer. The computer is faster. The man was better.
That's the whole debate, in a way. The computer wants consistency. The man wanted the Q because it looked right.
Hilbert: The computer is going to win. It always does. But the Q will still be on my cousin's garage wall.
On the road for another decade.
Hilbert:
