July 18th, 2005

Filed under:
Technology
7 Comments »

Given Yomi?

Yesterday I’m providing a little family tech support in Microsoft Outlook. I’m advising them how to sort their contacts when I spot this peculiar phrase among the list of sortable fields: given yomi. Having never heard the phrase, I did a little research.

I didn’t get all that far, but apparently ‘Daf Yomi’ refers to a daily page of the Talmud that Jews read each day. With 2711 folios or pages in the Talmud, it takes about seven and a half years to complete the entire cycle.

Could ‘Given Yomi’ refer to the particular page that was up on the day of your birth? Or are you essentially assigned a particular page at some point in your young life? Clearly my Yiddish scholarship is pretty weak, but it’s possibly the first time ever that a Microsoft product actually taught me something. I welcome corrections and kvetching from my Jewish readers.

Comments: 7 Responses so far

jo
July 18th, 2005
9:30 am

A quick search leads me to think that this is Japanese not Hebrew. Here’s a sampling: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP052509301033.aspx

[Reply]

Darren
July 18th, 2005
9:43 am

Jo: I encountered a Japanese meaning as well, but I read that it meant the land of the dead.

[Reply]

Jeff
July 18th, 2005
9:48 am

It appears that Yomi is a phonetic version of character languages that allows you to sort a launguage that would otherwise be unsortable.

[Reply]

Jeff
July 18th, 2005
9:56 am

Forgot to include sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On‘yomi

See Section on Readings
3.1 On’yomi (Chinese reading)
3.2 Kun’yomi (Japanese reading)

[Reply]

Darren
July 18th, 2005
10:02 am

Jeff: That seems to clear things up. Wikipedia’s search engine is lame, because when I searched it (or used Google to search ‘wikipedia yomi’), all I got was this article.

[Reply]

Karsten
October 10th, 2007
10:49 pm

In Japanese Contacts, a yomi field is present just above the First Name, the Last Name, and the Company fields. “Yomi” is the phonetic character (pronunciation) for the first and last names.

Yomi is currently generated only for the Japanese locale. With Unicode support in Outlook 2002, users can put in Japanese names in any locale. Outlook generates the Yomi, and attaches it with the contact. It is not seen until a Japanese contact form is used.

[Reply]

Carl
October 27th, 2007
3:28 pm

Somehow I ran across your “Given Yomi” blog entry and wanted to share what I found out. The “Given Yomi” field in Microsoft Outlook actually doesn’t relate to anything jewish or middle-east. The “Yomi” (short for Yomigana)fields are for holding phoneticly rendered Japanese (far-east)characters or ideographs which are graphic symbols that represent an idea or word. Here is one of many Microsoft documents that speak to the Yomi fields in Outlook: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa454655.aspx.

Just thought you might be interested to know…I sure didn’t! :) Peace…

[Reply]

Add a comment