John Hudson wrote: > At 02:36 PM 6/25/2003, Michael Everson wrote: > > >Write it up with glyphs and minimal pairs and people will see the problem, > >if any. Or propose some solution. (That isn't "add duplicate characters".) > > Peter Constable has written this up and submitted a proposal to the UTC.
And I hate to have to continue being Mr. Negativity on this list, but I remain unconvinced that the proposed solution (of cloning 14 Hebrew points and vowels) just to fix an unpreferred canonical reordering result represents the sole remaining alternative. In this case, I believe the side-effects of the proposed medicine are worse than the disease itself. For example, the alleged problem of the vocalization order of the Masoretes might be amenable to a much less drastic solution. People could consider, for example, representation of the required sequence: <lamed, qamets, hiriq, final mem> as: <lamed, qamets, ZWJ, hiriq, final mem> and then map <qamets, ZWJ, hiriq> to the required glyph to get the hiriq to display to the left (and partly under the following final mem). The presence of a ZWJ (cc=0) in the sequence would block the canonical reordering of the sequence to hiriq before qamets. If that is the essence of the problem needing to be addressed, then this is a much simpler solution which would impact neither the stability of normalization nor require mass cloning of vowels in order to give them new combining classes. Effectively what would be needed would be an agreement by Biblical Hebraicists on a text representational convention using existing characters. By doing so, they would gain both the required orderings and the ability to make the distinctions they want. If use of a ZWJ (or something similar) seems alien to Hebrew specialists, then, as always, the details can be hidden behind the details of input method and keyboard front ends. The use of a ZWJ should not impact searches on data (if the searches are properly implemented), unless the search is explicitly concerned about the distinctions -- in which case there actually *is* a difference in the text representation which can be searched for. The problem of combinations of vowels with meteg could be amenable to a similar approach. OR, one could propose just one additional meteq/silluq character, to make it possible to distinguish (in plain text) instances of left-side and right-side meteq placement, for example. --Ken
