Mark E. Shoulson wrote at 7:20 PM on Saturday, December 4, 2004: >I would say that pointing >one text with the vowels of another, without regard for discrepencies in >character-count, constitutes an abuse of the Hebrew orthography, and >shouldn't be considered "normal" usage that must be supported.
Calling ketiv/qere spellings orthographic abuse, abnormal, and not worthy of support in Unicode is based on reasoning backwards from the faulty Unicode model for encoded Hebrew, rather than forwards from the Hebrew script to an encoding model. >From an encoding point of view, ketiv/qere is NOTHING MORE than arbitrary sequences of Hebrew vowels and consonants, and just as Unicode supports ANY sequence of Latin vowels and consonants it should have, from the very beginning, supported ANY sequence of Hebrew vowels and consonants. The problem lies not in the script, the problem lies in the inadequate encoding model adopted for it - and it needs to be fixed. ALL of the Hebrew script must be supported; anything less is simply unacceptable. As I said similarly elsewhere, this must be supported in plan tixt - ketiv = "plain text", qere = "all scripts". As I have just demonstrated this is trivial in Latin; it should also be trivial in Hebrew. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
