Fw: [Biblical-languages] A threat to the integrity of the
Hebrew language?
Joan_Wardell at sil.org
Joan_Wardell at sil.org
Mon Jul 21 13:08:48 EDT 2003
Peter Constable has already replied, but I felt a bit more information
might be useful. I have no interest in starting up another lengthy email
battle on Hebrew issues. But the situation as I see it is:
1) Canonical order was never meant to be "store order". The W3C made a
mistake, or at least, did a disservice, when they declared data must also
be stored in canonical order.
2) Unicode has declared we cannot change the canonical order, even if it is
irrational as a store order.
The only apparent way to get a reasonable canonical/store order is to
propose new characters to the Unicode Committee which have the correct
properties or do something to prevent canonical ordering from occurring
(Ken Whisler has suggested the CJG character). This is not a formal
proposal to the Unicode Committee, by the way. The group of us named in the
proposal chose the first option - put in the corrected characters. We did
debate inserting different control characters, but did not find it
satisfactory. Following are two reasons I submit now:
1) Cursor positioning with diacritics is difficult enough without having to
trip over invisible characters.
2) Inserting a break between two vowels such as the patah and hiriq in
Jerusalem leaves a syllable starting with a diacritic which has no base
character. This is also not allowed in Unicode rules and would produce a
dotted circle.
Whisler's proposal also does not address other canonical ordering issues,
such as having the dagesh and rafe separated and after the vowels!
In my opinion, Constable's proposal was extremely well thought out and the
only change I would suggest is to deprecate the existing Hebrew vowels
rather than separate modern Hebrew from biblical. I see no need to do that.
Joan Wardell
SIL
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