will accept either form of input, but frequently normalize it to the combining characters. There are, however, some applications that normalize all input to precomposed characters. Digital texts containing the combining, and the precomposed alternatives are therefore both encountered. An example of extensive text using precomposed characters is provided by the online edition of the periodical לעבּנס־פֿראַגן (lebns-fragn – "Life Questions"). The present article was written using combining characters with the exception of the second row in the following table, which is provided to illustrate the differences between the two forms. In a viewing environment prone to the misalignment of base characters with their combining marks, precomposed characters are more likely to be typographically stable (but may cause greater difficulty in other regards). Punctuation The punctuation marks used to indicate sentence structure — the comma, period, colon, and semicolon — are the same in Yiddish as they are in English. The punctuation used for the abbreviation, contraction, and concatenation of words — the apostrophe and hyphen — are conceptually similar but typographically distinct in a manner that, yet again, can cause confusion when represented digitally. This can be illustrated with the contraction for (es iz = "it is"), which is (s'iz = "it's"). Although the Yiddish punctuation mark is termed an (apostrof) the character used to represent it is the Hebrew geresh, which differs both in its graphic appearance and, more importantly, in its digital representation. (The APOSTROPHE is U+0027, and the HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERESH is U+05F3.) What is termed a double apostrophe is used to indicate abbreviation through the removal of several consecutive letters. For example, (doktor = "doctor") is abbreviated (equivalent to "Dr."). The punctuation mark is, however, not the QUOTATION MARK (U+0022), but the HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERSHAYIM (U+05F4), which is the dual form of the word geresh. Yiddish words are also hyphenated in a manner that is directly comparable to English punctuation. The character used to indicate it is, however, not the HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D), but the HEBREW PUNCTUATION MAQAF (U+05BE). The latter character appears as the horizontal mark flush with the top of the text in (mame-loshn – "mother tongue"; the common vernacular designation for the Yiddish language). Typeset text may also indicate hyphenation with a character resembling an equal sign (⸗), sometimes in an oblique variant, but this is uncommon in digital text. The distinctions between geresh – gershayim – maqaf and "apostrophe – quotation mark