Q&A: What do you think of the new “Latinized Kazakh” alphabet from the point of orthography and phonetics?

I don’t know Kazakh, but I do know that the proliferation of letters with apostrophes in the new proposed alphabet is a mistake.

Is there any specific set of instructions on how to Romanize Hebrew?

The Square Hebrew / SimHebrew™ Converter will convert any Square Hebrew text into Roman characters (and back again), with full fidelity with regard to spelling and distinction between seemingly homophonous characters:

As with French, German, Italian, or any other Roman-based language, however, you would have to bear in mind that certain characters have different phonetic values compared with English:

So long Genesis, hello Exodus: the SimHebrew Bible

Imagine a Latin text—e.g. the first verse of the Latin Vulgate Bible:

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram Terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.

Most of us don’t know Latin, but at least we can read it, and guess at the meaning of some words—or look them up.

Q&A: Why was almost all the knowledge of Ancient Egypt lost until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone?

Ancient Egyptian paid the price of being over-exclusive. Since the skill of writing (and reading) hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic writing was jealously guarded by a small, exclusive caste of scribes, once the Alexandrian and Roman conquests undermined the old Pharaonic regime and made Greek the new language and culture of the elite, that skill became largely redundant, and died out with the scribes.

Version 0.99 of the Square Hebrew Simulator now available

After further help from Rob Dunsmuir of Custom Coding, version 0.99 of the Square Hebrew-Simulator is now up and running and available for public use.

Q&A: Which top countries have their own alphabet but have transliteration problem in Latin characters?

I don’t know if Israel counts as a “top country” in this regard, but it does have a problem with transliteration of Hebrew into English (or in Roman characters in general).

Essentially, the problem is one of what is known in information theory as information loss: in the process of converting from Hebrew to English, information about the spelling of words (including the distinctions between letters that are essentially homophonic, such as ḥet and khaf, tet and tav, kaf and quf, samekh and sin, etc.) is lost, so if you were to try and convert back to Hebrew, you wouldn’t be able to reconstitute the original spelling—even if you were a native Hebrew speaker and recognised the words, as in the following example, from a poem of homophones titled Modern-day Ecclesiastes:

Modern-day Ecclesiastes

Modern-day Ecclesiastes is a poem to illustrate how the spelling distinctions between homophones in modern Hebrew are irretrievably lost in the conventional quasi-phonetic transliteration of Hebrew in Roman characters. It is a useful tool for testing the fidelity and reversibility of any Hebrew-to-Roman transcription system. (Translation below.)

For a PDF version, showing the Hebrew, conventional and SimHebrew transliterations, and translation, click here.

Q&A: Are there rules to making ligatures in handwritten Hebrew?

True ligatures, in the sense of a character made up of two enjoined letters, like œ or fl, don’t really exist in Hebrew—with the possible exception of the double yod (ײַ), which was common in Yiddish, but little used in Hebrew (most people aren’t even aware that has its own keystroke).

If you mean instances of joined-up letters in modern Hebrew cursive (as I suspect you do), those are mostly precluded by the very nature of that cursive.