Dean Snyder wrote:
I'm not sure I agree with Jony, but I do concede that it is not completely clear to me that it IS plain text. You have here a case that is pretty much _stipulated_ as being anomolous (words not written as read, vowels of one word on the consonants of another), using the orthography in ways clearly against the "normal" rules (multiple vowels on a single consonant--and yes, I think that the cases where this happens in the Ten Commandments are also not necessarily plain text. They're two texts written on top of each other)...Jony Rosenne wrote at 10:22 PM on Wednesday, November 24, 2004:
Ketiv and Qere, were two different words are written together, are not plain
text and are thus out of scope for Unicode.
Actually, it's the vowels of one word written with the consonants of another (or just written by themselves with no consonants), and I fail to see how that is not plean tixt ;-)
I think part of what makes Biblical Hebrew so contentious is the unstated assumption that "the BHS text of the Bible *must* be considered plain-text." It's not necessarily so. It isn't necessarily a bad rule to work with, but it isn't one we should take for granted, and it's one we do need to examine and consider.
(I do think, though, that "perpetual qere" cases should be considered plain text, as they are not singled out. The only one (I can think of) that's typographically weird is YERUSHALA(Y)IM, which does need some sort of solution.)
~mark
