On 26/11/2004 03:40, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
...
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 understand that this is not self-evident. But let's look at the arguments. The word forms which by my contention should be supported as plain text are the ones actually found, not just in a single Bible edition, but in Hebrew Bible manuscripts from the 10th century CE and in all printed editions, except perhaps for some simplified ones, until today. (Some of the special features which have already been accepted by the UTC, such as right METEG, are found in only some such manuscripts and editions, but this is not true of the Qere/Ketiv blended forms.) And the distinctions made have real semantic significance, they are not simply layout preferences. As I understand it, Unicode intends to be able to represent the semantically significant features of texts in general use. This is clearly a text in general use, and the special formatting features of it are semantically significant. Therefore they should be represented in Unicode.
It is true that these special formatting features have a complex relationship to the actual phonetic realisation of the text, and can be fully understood only in conjunction with the marginal notes. But Unicode has never been intended to represent the phonetic realisation of a text, and it has certainly not been restricted to characters which are part of that phonetic realisation. The criterion for a Unicode character is not that it has a distinct sound, but that it has a distinct, and semantically significant, written form. These Qere/Ketiv blended forms are the actual written forms in the text, and as such, irrespective of how they might be pronounced or not pronounced, they are the ones which Unicode needs to represent.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
