Fw: [Biblical-languages] A threat to the integrity of the Hebrew language?

Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
Mon Jul 21 11:28:31 EDT 2003


On 21/07/2003 10:08, Joan_Wardell at sil.org wrote:

>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
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Biblical-languages mailing list
>Biblical-languages at lists.ibiblio.org
>http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/biblical-languages
>
>  
>
Thank you, Joan. Well, out of the many responses I have had only you and 
Paul Nelson have supported the proposal; even Peter C himself was very 
lukewarm. In my opinion, and all the more so in that of most Jewish 
scholars, the one thing that kills the proposal utterly is the idea of 
doing something different for biblical from modern Hebrew. Even you 
don't support that.

As for what is and what isn't allowed by Unicode rules, no one on the 
Unicode list made that objection to Ken Whistler's suggestion and they 
are the people who know the rules because they wrote them. What is 
certainly not allowed is the current situation in which combining marks 
which interact typographically have different combining classes.

It looks as if there is a real possibility of getting together pressure 
to fix this basic problem by changing the combining classes, as an 
exceptional matter to fix errors. That is what I want to concentrate on now.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/




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