[Biblical-languages] Unicode proposals for apparatus symbols, Biblical Hebrew

Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
Thu Jun 26 08:11:40 EDT 2003


Peter_Constable at sil.org wrote:

>I have submitted a couple of proposals for apparatus symbols: one for the
>sign for the Semaritan Pentateuch (used for instance in BHS), and one for
>the Coptic letter eie (not widely used, but found in Hodges & Farstad
>_Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text_, in which it stands
>for a collection of Egyptian manuscripts when in agreement).
>
>The two documents are
>
>SamaritanPentSignProposal.pdf "Proposal to Encode Samaritan Pentateuch
>Sign"
>AppCopticEieProposal.pdf "Proposal to Encode Coptic Letter Eie for Use in
>Textual Apparatus"
>
>and can be found at
>
>http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=PCUnicodeDocs
>
>
>Note also another proposal at the same location related to encoding of
>Biblical Hebrew:
>
>BibHebAltCharsProposal.pdf "Proposal to Encode Alternative Characters for
>Biblical Hebrew"
>
>
>I'm expecting the Hebrew proposal to be considered by UTC today (unless
>they run out of time); the other will likely have to wait for the next UTC
>meeting, in August. (No matter -- they'd get added to Unicode 4.1 either
>way.) Also, the Coptic eie may take a while since it's a Coptic letter, and
>work is in progress on dealing with all of Coptic, so it may need to wait
>for that work to get done.
>
>
>
>- Peter
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Peter Constable
>
>Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
>7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
>Tel: +1 972 708 7485
>
>
>  
>
Peter, I have just got round to looking at your "Proposal to Encode 
Alternative Characters for Biblical Hebrew". And I must say that I have 
some serious reservations about this proposal, especially the proposal 
to encode a separate set of biblical Hebrew vowels.

I am disappointed that you have taken this proposal so far without 
discussing it with this list, or with a former colleague like myself. 
Indeed I would suggest that this makes a mockery of your answers: "2a. 
Has contact been made to members of the user community? Yes 2b. With 
whom? Biblical Hebrew researchers, content providers of materials 
related to Biblical Hebrew". At least it seems that this significant 
community of such people, of whom you are well aware, has been kept in 
the dark, while the once sensible proposals you were working on a year 
or so ago have been turned into something which is at least to me quite 
unacceptable.

To illustrate my reservations, I wonder how you, the Unicode committees, 
and users in general would react to a proposal that vowels in 
Shakespearean English should be encoded at different code points from 
the same vowels in modern English, in order to accommodate some rare 
quirk of Shakespeare's spelling. I think this would be laughed out of 
court. Or if some people took it seriously enough that serious arguments 
had to be made against it, all sorts of questions would be raised about 
where you draw the dividing line between older and modern English, what 
you do about quotations from Shakespeare in modern English, how to do 
searches to match either version, etc etc. And there would be years of 
nightmares about lack of font and keyboard support, and probably for 
evermore documents would be found with mixed encodings and so 
unsearchable. But your proposal for Hebrew is essentially the same as 
this. The difference between biblical and modern Hebrew is similar to 
that between Shakespeare and modern English, there is a similar 
continuous tradition of writing, and the biblical text is regularly 
quoted in religious writings in Hebrew probably even today.

So please think again. There are other solutions. Is changing the 
existing combining classes really unthinkable? The objection that 
existing documents will lose normalisation stability is meaningless as 
anything normalised under the old scheme is still valid text under the 
new one and vice versa - and your current proposal will completely 
invalidate a significant corpus which is already in existence, i.e. 
biblical texts and any texts which quote it. A case for changes can well 
be made on the grounds that this is "a clear and evident mistake" which 
arose in "the situation where the Unicode Standard first encodes 
less-well documented characters and scripts", as described in 
http://www.unicode.org/standard/stability_policy.html.

But there are alternative solutions to the problem which, though messy, 
are not as bad as your proposal for a complete new set of characters;

1) For the vowels: I note that the commonest case of two vowels on one 
base character occurs when a base character has been omitted, i.e. yod 
in the shorter of the two spellings of Jerusalem. (This is an omission 
relative to the pronunciation indicated, not relative to earlier MSS.) 
This is actually reflected in your quoted passage from Tov which shows 
the hireq under the right side of the following final mem. (But note 
that moving the hireq to after the final mem is not a feasible solution 
as there are cases where there is a suffix, i.e. a vowel point on the 
mem and a he.) So this issue could be solved by adding a non-printing 
base character representing an omitted or "phantom" consonant. This is 
also required in some Ketib/Qere cases (Qere without Ketib) where vowel 
points are found without consonants e.g. at Ruth 3:17. So this would 
require one extra character to be added to Unicode; or could some 
existing character be used e.g. FEFF or 200D?

Most of the other cases of two vowels on one base character are those in 
the Ten Commandments where the two vowels represent two alternative 
pointings of the word. I would again suggest using some kind of special 
character to indicate alternative characters, this would probably have 
to be an added one. Or else the same character could be used here as for 
Jerusalem even though the semantics here are rather different. Of course 
if a new character were described as something like "normalisation 
override" it would do for both situations!

2) For meteg/silluq: The simple solution here is to add characters for 
the comparatively rare right meteg and mid-positioned meteg, with 
compatibility equivalence to regular meteg. Or instead of mid-positioned 
meteg (which I don't think your proposal actually provides a solution 
for) there could be special combined hataf vowel and meteg combinations 
(only three or perhaps two required) with compatibility decompositions 
to hataf vowel and regular meteg. (Search software would probably 
normally ignore meteg, as it should ignore accents, as these are so 
variable in different occurrences.) Alternatively, the "normalisation 
override" character approach could work here for the right meteg, though 
not for the mid-positioned one.

3) For holam and shin/sin dot: This tidying up part of the proposal 
makes sense if the other parts of the proposal are accepted but not if 
the other parts are withdrawn. The new order would of course be an 
improvement if used for all Hebrew, but not if applied only to biblical 
Hebrew in the way you propose. Meanwhile the processing speed objection 
should be disregarded as the processing time required to sort a list of 
up to six characters is simply trivial; if a particular implementation 
cannot do this efficiently, this should be fixed by the implementer. 
Anyway, the proposal doesn't fix this problem for modern Hebrew texts 
and so an efficient solution will still be required. As for usability, 
users can type in the characters in any order and the result is still 
valid Unicode; if a normalised text is required, a normalisation process 
should be applied as it will never be safe to rely on users typing 
accurately normalised text.

I would urge you to withdraw this proposal and prepare a new one on the 
lines I suggest here, in consultation with this list and with others.

I note that this proposal does not deal with some other characters 
needed for biblical Hebrew, specifically inverted nun (SIL Ezra 078, 
M-C/WTS N]8) and lower dot (SIL Ezra 179, M-C/WTS 53). I hope these 
issues have not been forgotten.

(I am copying this to those of your fellow requesters in the proposal 
for whom I have e-mail addresses - sorry if they get duplicate copies.)

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




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