I am new to this forum and appologize for not tagging. I have no idea what tag to use. I am using Gramps 6.0.8, and am wondering if there is any way to permanently change the spelling of the Hebrew months that Gramps uses. I am used to spelling them differently, and would like to be able to change them. For example: Gramps has Nisan, I would change to Nissan. Gramps has Heshvan, I would change to Cheshvan. I am not a programmer, so anything requiring python or the like would need to be spoonfed. Thank you all.
Don’t worry about using the tagging in Discourse. Admins like to make it easier to find related “previous answers”. This forum has existed since the beginning of 2020 and finding ‘stuff’ is growing more difficult.
Which language are you using for the Gramps interface? The language files can be customized.
background from Perplexity.ai
Modern Transliteration Styles
- “Nisan” (Single ‘s’): This spelling follows strict, academic phonetic systems like the Modern Israeli Hebrew standard. Because Modern Hebrew does not double its consonant sounds when speaking, linguists use a single “s” to match exactly how the word sounds aloud. [Wikipedia, homework.study.com]
- “Nissan” (Double ‘s’): This spelling is favored by traditional and Anglo-Orthodox communities—most notably Chabad-Lubavitch and various Ashkenazi groups. It reflects an older grammatical rule where a silent Dagesh Hazak (a grammatical dot indicating doubling) is implicitly understood to strengthen the consonant. It is also used to clearly separate the English syllables (“Nis-san”).
That is a great question, and welcome to the Gramps community!
Unfortunately it is also a hard question. It is possible today, but it involves complex, brittle steps that I am not going to even mention.
But there could be a general solution to a very general problem: “I want to add/change a translation” Let me work up a prototype for the developers to review. It would not be ready until Gramps 6.2 (Oct 2026) but I think could help solve a few issues that we are currently wrestling with.
I am using English, as I am a native English speaker. However I am also Jewish, and routinely use the traditional Anglo-Saxon communities spelling (as you quoted in your response).
If you look at the (Weblate-powered) translations for Gramps, several languages list the Nissan variant for a Nisan source string:
- Catalan
- French
- Norwegian Nynorsk {but not Norwegian Bokmål }
- Portuguese (Brazil) {but not Portuguese (Portugal) }
I’m sorry, I’m just confused. Does a translation into French or Catalan help me if I’m using English? I’m just a little clueless.
We can change the source strings if necessary. Weblate makes this very easy.
Perhaps we should ask our Hebrew translators for advice first.
@morningstar, I looked into a way to answer your question in the easiest possible manner, and this suggests some work to do in Gramps. The proposed solution also creates a new way for translators to work.
I’m going to post a link to the proposal, but this (and the rest of this message) is more for developers.
Proposal:
This proposal makes connections to Weblate, the system we use for our collaborative on-line translation system. The proposal calls for:
- downloads from Weblate (on user request) to get updated translations between releases
- uploads from Weblate (under user control) to update/add translations for a particular language
CC: @Nick-Hall @GaryGriffin @bryndin @eduralph @codefarmer and others
From a bit of discovery work, these spelling variants are more common for the “orthodox” branches… which is about 10%-15% of the community.
As a test of the translation customization prototype, I changed every translatable strings in the customizable JSON file to Pig Latin text.
It works!
I was going to do Klingon (as also as a test for having an LLM do the full translation) but that would have used up a lot of my Claude tokens, (and time & energy) and Pig Latin can be done programmatically. CC: @emyoulation
Thanks for tagging me, Nick — happy to weigh in as the Hebrew translator.
There genuinely are two different conventions here, and Gramps currently
follows the more “scholarly” one rather than the traditional Anglo-Jewish
community one. Both Nisan/Nissan and Heshvan/Cheshvan are good
examples of the split:
| Hebrew | Standard/scholarly (LC romanization, Encyclopaedia Judaica) | Traditional Anglo-Jewish community usage | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| תשרי | Tishri | Tishrei | Community form reflects the tzere-yod ending |
| חשוון | Heshvan | Cheshvan | Community form renders ח as “Ch” |
| כסלו | Kislev | Kislev | No meaningful difference |
| טבת | Tevet | Teves | Ashkenazi-influenced pronunciation (sav without dagesh → “s”) |
| שבט | Shevat | Shevat / Shvat | Minor variation, both common |
| אדר א | Adar I | Adar Rishon / Adar Aleph | |
| אדר ב | Adar II | Adar Sheni / Adar Bet | |
| ניסן | Nisan | Nissan | Double-s form is very common; also collides with the car brand |
| אייר | Iyyar | Iyar | LC uses double-y; everyday usage is usually single-y |
| סיוון | Sivan | Sivan | No meaningful difference |
| תמוז | Tammuz | Tammuz | Consistent, double-m is standard either way |
| אב | Av | Av (sometimes “Menachem Av”) | Consistent |
| אלול | Elul | Elul | Consistent |
So the short answer to morningstar’s original question: Nisan and
Heshvan aren’t wrong, they’re just the academic/library-standard
spellings rather than the spellings most English-speaking observant
communities actually use day to day.
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the source strings should
change — that affects every locale that hasn’t overridden them, not just
English — but if it’s helpful, I’m glad to keep an eye on how any change
here would interact with the Hebrew locale itself.