Re: [hebrew] Re: proposals I wrote (and also, didn't write)

[Mark E. Shoulson]

E. Keown wrote:
       Elaine in Vancouver
Dear Mark:
Thanks, I guess.
 

This is the one I'm going to  comment on, since it's
the one I know best. 
I know that Michael Everson and I are working on a
Samaritan proposal, 
   

It appears to me that my proposal came first, no?  By
some months...I have some material from Abraham Tal, a
well-known figure in Israel.  
 

Yes, yours did come first.  Like I said, we're working on one also, 
which I hope will also be useful, and possibly more complete than what 
you started out with.  I also corresponded with Abraham Tal, and also 
with several other experts in the field.  I thought it was a good thing 
that we all sought expert input.

So what's the significance of what you're saying,
politically?  
 

I don't know.  I try to avoid politics, if possible.  The significance 
of what I'm saying is that you have made a good start in your proposal, 
that it has some shortcomings, and that I hope to be able to help put 
something more complete together.

My work is based on scholarly info, and looks at the
marks as pointing---one of several sets of pointing
which will ultimately all need to be collated in.  
 

As is mine.  I have Ben-Hayyim's book on Samaritan Hebrew, stuff by Alan 
Crown, the same Dotan article you have, a few other books and articles 
from the scholarly community, etc.  I would hope that all our work would 
be as firmly based in scholarship (both from within and without the 
Samaritan community) as possible.

I'll have to look closely at samples again, but it seems to me that the 
accent marks are not pointing and thus not combining marks (though the 
vowel points of course are combining marks).  They appear to be used 
more as punctuation than as letter-diacriticals.  When the books I've 
ordered come in, I'll have more to go on, this time from the inside of 
the community (beyond what I've gotten so far).

I didn't comment at all on the upper- or lower- case
issue because it wasn't clear at all to me how they
should be handled.  And still isn't.
There'll probably be some lively discussion about it as we get through 
this, but it's pretty clear to me, anyway, that it's a font distinction 
and nothing more.  The only reason for thinking about it as "case" is 
because Western scholars chose to call them "majuscule" and "minuscule" 
and not "book-hand" and "cursive" or something like that.

~mark