On 30/07/2003 13:22, Ted Hopp wrote:
On Wednesday, July 30, 2003 2:13 PM, Peter Kirk wrote:
... analogous to the the past tense, female, second person of
borrow: <lamed-qamats-vav-vav-qamats-he>.).
To me as a reader of biblical Hebrew, this form looks like an error. I
would expect either sheva under the first vav, or the two vavs to be
combined into one with dagesh. Nowhere in the Bible do two consonantal
vavs occur together, without a full vowel between them.
But this wasn't Biblical Hebrew, it was in a modern book for English
speakers learning Hebrew. If by "error" you mean "non-standard," I'd agree.
If you mean "unintended", however, then it is not an error. The author makes
the point himself that using vowels on top of full spelling is
"unauthentic." However, Unicode shouldn't disqualify the poor guy's usage!
(Even if he is only the current president of the [U.S.] National Association
of Professors of Hebrew.)
OK, I won't flunk him! :-) Of course we need to support modern Hebrew
including every strange variant as well as biblical. And vice versa.
Putting kholam before vav in order to represent kholam male is a fragile
kludge. I can imagine breaking it with a sentence that starts, "Nowhere in
the Hebrew Bible do the following character sequences occur: ...". ...
Depends what you mean by "break". The renderer won't crash, but it won't
render anything meaningful if what is put in is not meaningful. Just as
putting "xzxzxzxzxz" after "Nowhere in the works of Shakespeare do the
following character sequences occur: ..." turns "xzxzxzxzxz" into
something meaningful.
...Furthermore, the issue isn't whether the convention is internally
consistent, it's that it violates Unicode rules about combining characters.
At a minimum, this interpretation and algorithm would have to become
normative parts of Unicode for it to be useful for data interchange.
The encoding would have to become normative. The rendering algorithm
wouldn't, though it would probably need to be outlined in a recommendation.
Every developer who cares about kholam male vs. vav-kholam khaser has had to
invent some hack to get things to work for his or her needs, because Unicode
doesn't support the distinction. Standardizing on one particular hack
doesn't strike me as the way to go.
But surely standardising on one particular sensible interpretation is
the way to go. And one person's hack is another person's sensible
interpretation.
I ought to be able to encode what I want and have it decoded at the other
end the way I intended. On occassion, we intentionally mis-spell things in
English; let's not rely on the assumption that Hebrew is exempt.
Agreed.
As for proposing a new character to Unicode, it's an idea I'd strongly
support. But my assessment is that making and following up with such a
proposal is a quite sizeable project, and, frankly, we don't have the
resources to pursue it. (Witness the effort put forth by the UYIP folks in
getting HEBREW LETTER YOD WITH HIRIQ [FB1D] accepted.)
This depends on who you mean by "we". It's not just you and me, Ted. If
in discussions on this list a consensus is reached that this is the best
way to go, then we have the top people in Unicode behind us and
convinced in advance. Someone needs to draw up a formal proposal, I
suppose, but that's not a big job. SBL and SIL both have a stake here
and experienced people who can help, if they agree. If we can't convince
this list, then we are probably on a loser. But I already see several
people starting to agree that a new character is the best way to deal
with this issue.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
