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
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