On 30/10/2003 21:15, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
Peter Kirk wrote:
On 28/10/2003 18:49, Philippe Verdy wrote:
I just finished an Excel speadsheet that shows the Hebrew
composition model,
and all the problems caused by the canonical order of Hebrew
diacritics.
In summary, most problems come from consonnant modifiers which have a
combining class higher than vowels or vowel modifiers.
If vowels had been assigned a null combining class, such problems
would have
not appeared. The idea of generating a CGJ before all vowels in input
methods (and then let a prenormalization process remove unnecessary
CGJ in
composed strings) seems interesting, as it forces vowels to behave
like base
characters, but it does not solve all the problem, but only the
ordering
problem caused by the wrong combining classes 21, 24 and 25 assigned
respectively to DAGESH/MAPIQ, SHIN DOT and SIN DOT, that come logically
before the vowels (in classes 10 to 20), or vowel modifiers (classes
22, 23
and 26).
Actually rafe, in class 23, and varika, class 26 but not used in
Hebrew, should be considered consonant modifiers. Rafe basically
indicates the absence of dagesh, and so these two fit in the same
logical class.
This may or may not matter, but I should point out that rafe (or
something that looks an awful lot like it) has started to see some use
for other purposes. The very large Artscroll publication house puts a
rafe over a letter which has a "moving" sheva under it (as opposed to
a "quiescent" sheva. I think "shewa mobile" is the fancy term). A
particularly innovative book of Psalms I have uses it precisely the
opposite: to indicate a *silent* sheva, but only for cases where they
think you're likely to make a mistake. It also uses it for non-dagesh
in cases where they think you might get it wrong intuitively.
~mark
Trying to wade through email after ~2days with mail server down. Sorry.
Interesting. But I don't think it matters because rafe and sheva do not
interact typographically. I suppose it could cause difficulties if
someone wanted to collate rafe and sheva as a pair - this process would
be confused if the two were prevented from being in canonical order by a
CGJ. But there would be even more of a problem if they were in canonical
order and so potentially separated by dagesh and meteg. Probably the
best modification of Philippe's proposal would be to take this as a
separate function of rafe, and to order rafe used in this function as a
vowel modifier, but rafe used as an anti-dagesh as a consonant modifier.
The rendering would be the same.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
