Peter Kirk wrote:
On 19/07/2004 03:20, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
Agreed. But then there are a few characters which are not combining marks but which are really part of the accent system and so should perhaps be stripped when points are removed: 05C0 paseq/legarmeh, which should be deleted; and 05BE maqaf, which should be replaced by a (word dividing) space. For 05C0 is an annotation which certainly has no place in an unpointed text; and in an accented text whether two words are separated by maqaf or space depends on their accentuation, and space is always used in unaccented texts....
Jony's right: when it's down to brass tacks in Hebrew, it's consonants and whitespace (and punctuation, I guess).
Your logic is okay, however in fact maqaf is not uncommon in unpointed texts. If it were left in, it would still look okay. It would also look okay if taken out, so there's not much harm either way.
Paseq has got to go, yes.
Within the biblical text it would also be logical to delete 05C3 sof pasuq, but its use elsewhere as punctuation suggests otherwise.
I'd leave it: it's a reasonable and well-understood punctuation.
~mark
