With all my reading of inscriptions on matzevot, especially in Slovakia, I come across issues I cannot resolve.
Take the name of Yehuda (יהודה). Anyone with some knowledge of the Torah and shevatim knows how it should be spelled. That it also has within it shem H-shem is readily discernible. So I wonder why I have seen it written variously as יהודא, with an aleph at the end, or Yuda (יודא, יודה). Were they being so cautious as to not inscribe shem H-shem? If this is a Yiddish form of the name, why use this form rather than the real Hebrew spelling?
Would they even have written it in one of these ways on a ketuba or get?
Any suggestions for this practice?
Thanks in advance.
To all who responded, thanks for all your observations.
I'd like to add, that I may still have a puzzle though: I might expect that if they had some additional wording in Aramaic on a matzeva, that then they might have been consistent with Yehuda with an aleph. It will take some time to review those instances.
In the thousands of Ashkenazi matzevot I have looked at so far, it was very rare indeed to find an inscription in Yiddish. So maybe as some have indicated it is just a minhag (custom) and I just won't worry about it too much.
