meteg positioning problem

Patrick Durusau pdurusau at emory.edu
Tue Dec 17 17:18:37 EST 2002


Peter,

Peter_Constable at sil.org wrote:

>Many of you will know that meteg can occur in different positions relative
>to a vowel -- left, right or medial (with hataf vowels). In the BHK,
>positioning meteg on the right was used as a text-critical convention. I
>have no idea how all three positions arose in BHS, but they are attested.
>For instance:
>
>hataph patah + medial meteg: Lev. 21:10.4
>hataph patah + left meteg: Job 22:4.1
>hataph patah + right meteg: Ps 85:7.1
>
>Here's a count that was obtained from the Michigan-Clarmont text:
>
>Vowel         Left  Right  Medial
>sheva          615   11       0
>hataf segol      2    0      28
>hataf patah      4    2      50
>hataf qamats     0    0       0
>hiriq         7318   27     N/A
>tsere         4377   38     N/A
>segol         4741   59     N/A
>patah         3933  412     N/A
>qamats      11,427  184     N/A
>holam         6581    9     N/A
>qubuts         132    1     N/A
>
>(No guarantee this is completely accurate; one of my co-workers produced
>this for me, but I discovered a couple of errors. I checked the counts for
>hataf vowels manually.)
>
>These distinctions are encoded in the Michigan-Claremont-Westminster eBHS
>text.
>
>My question is this: do Biblical Hebrew experts want a way to encode these
>distinctions in Unicode? (It currently does not provide any means for
>this.)
>
Is the "not any means for this" because  in Unicode, meteg, 05BD, is 
"left attached (reordrant around single base character)?" (Interested 
readers should see 
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.html for an 
explanation of "left attached (reordrant around single base character)" 
under the heading Canonical Combining Classes.) Based on the evidence 
you cite, should this be reported as a "bug" in Unicode?

To answer your original question, yes, it is important to be able to 
represent the "varying" placement of the meteg. I would think you could 
do that with OpenType but for the it being in the Canonical Combining 
Class. (That is just a first impression and I have not verified that 
impression.)

BTW, wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to one and all at SIL.

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau at emory.edu






More information about the Biblical-languages mailing list