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

Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
Thu Jun 26 08:43:30 EDT 2003


Paul Nelson (TYPOGRAPHY) wrote:

>Dear Peter Kirk,
>
>I hope you are doing well.
>
>The proposal for encoding Biblical Hebrew marks is the *only* option
>available to us. The UTC has been very clear that we cannot change
>combining class information as it would cause serious reprocussions on
>all types of index and information servers world wide.
>
>Yes, this will cause a significant problem with existing Biblical
>corpus. However, due to XML requirements to us NFC form, it is totally
>impossible to correctly represent Biblical text once it has gone through
>the normalization process. 
>
>This issue has not been taken lightly. Peter Constable's proposal was
>not created in a vaccuum. There was a significant amount of dicussion on
>this topic over a period of months by people who have been working on
>Hebrew OpenType fonts for Biblical applications.
>
>Sorry that you missed out on the earlier discussions.
>
>Regards,
>
>Paul
>
>
>  
>
Thank you, Paul. I am doing well, now outside SIL.

If it is indeed the case that the existing Hebrew block is fatally 
flawed and these flaws cannot be rectified, the only adequate solution I 
can see is to deprecate the entire Hebrew block and start with a fresh 
one. Any attempt to force a dividing line between modern and biblical 
Hebrew is not only an attack on the integrity of the Hebrew language and 
on the religious heritage of its speakers, it is also bound to fail 
because no such division can be made.

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




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