On Sun, 19 May 2002, Uri Bruck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The Hebrew alphabet also remained pretty much constant for the last 2K > years, and is flexible enough to serve well three languages
No, it remained dead and nobody used it in day to day. Because it is a stupid alphabet, optimized for carving on stone. There are many more problems with Hebrew's native alphabet than just RTL (which is itself a problem with smearing ink on non-electronic media, so it's not a new problem): it OCRs very poorly (there are only so many ways you can chisel), it sucks for cursory reading (ditto), it loses gobs of information (vowels). The alphabet is silly. Unless you believe there is something holy about it, I don't see the point with sticking with a design decision made 5k years ago and which only made sense with the technology at that time. There are many good alternatives. Why not rally behind one of those instead of trying to add more hacks to support a brain dead alphabet which would have died millenia ago had anyone been using it in his day to day life instead of putting it on a pedestal and using a secular language for conducting business. It is a damn shame that Eliezer Ben Yehuda didn't do more about it, but we can pick up the slack where he left off. But no, people will whine to no end about how I have no feelings for my native tongue while actively murdering it by equating in programmers' mind world wide that supporting Hebrew is just too damn hard. > The Greek alphabet is also quite similar to its parent alphabet, the > early Hebrew alphabet, which also is also the parent alphabet of the > current Hebrew alphabet. So what's your point? LTR ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
