> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: RE: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew Kent asserted in response to my comment:
>> Exactly. And frankly, I am finding it difficult to understand >> why people are characterizing the CGJ proposal as a kludge >> or an ugly hack. > I find the entire idea with CGJ (for any use) a kludge... But why? I've given a whole series of reasons explaining why insertion of CGJ would resolve the problem at hand without requiring any new encoding, without cloning any new Hebrew points, and without destabilizing normalization. Detractors come back with, essentially, "I don't like that because I don't like that." How is "discovery" that CGJ has the ideal set of properties to deal with the current problem any more a kludge than "discovering" that ZWJ/ZWNJ could be used to deal with ligation control as well as cursive joining, even though ligation was not part of their original definition? For that matter, many characters originating as control functions for hardware have morphed in usage over time, as the nature of software and its requirements have changed. I suppose TAB, CR, LF, and FF are kludges, too, but they have been put to new purposes as appropriate over the years. > > A possible solution to the particular problem at hand that > hasn't yet been mentioned (that I've noticed), is to use the > already encoded vowel characters for the most part (also > for biblical texts), but use new "biblical" vowels only for the > occurrences where they occur as *second* vowel (with an > implied invisible consonant): HEBREW SECOND VOWEL HIRIQ, > etc. (Strikes me as rather elegant, though it requires the > addition of new characters.) Now *that* is a kludge! ;-) For all of the reasons that Ted Hopp immediately threw at it. It makes too many assumptions about the potential scope of the problem (which combinations are actually extant, for example), which will inevitably lead it back to being the same as the original proposal to just recode the entire set of vowel points. --Ken
