On 19 May 2002, Moshe Zadka wrote: > 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 adesign decision made 5k years ago and which > only made sense with the technology at that time.
(and the alphabet you are refering to was relevant to the time people wrote with very primitive pens on very problematic paper. Non of this is relevant to pencils, and to printed materials. Let's leave this aside) The ammount of legacy literature. Hebrew computer literature may be lacking, but there are huge ammounts of existing literature. Even if you ignore the caltural aspects, the economic cost of the transfer, re-education etc. is huge. It may have been economically-resonable, had there been no alternatives. > > 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. Surprisingly enough, the Unicode standard decided to support this greatest issue of the Hebrew alphabet: bidirectional movement. This is a standard dated to the begining of the ninetees. Not to ancient history. It seems that us silly folks in Israel are not the only ones who think that the problems of Hebrew are solvable and should be confronted. > > 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. It costs less and takes less time to add decent and standard Hebrew support than to re-educate all the Hebrew population. (Disclaimer: I have done no such research, and cannot point to any research that will support this claim. Those are my own opinions based on my own knowledge) -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================= 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]
