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

Paul Nelson (TYPOGRAPHY) paulnel at winse.microsoft.com
Thu Jun 26 08:54:41 EDT 2003


The combining class issue is not an issue if Hebrew users only use
nikud. In reality, it is only a few edge cases of Biblical usage that
necessitated this change. Because the change is limited to Biblical
Hebrew usage I do not expect that there would be any problems with this
proposal.

The impact of changing the encoding only reaches to the Biblical Hebrew
community who cannot use Unicode as it is currently defined. Will that
community object to the only hope of being able to use Unicode for
representing their text?

The idea of depricating the entire Hebrew block and creating a new one
is much worse than the surgical changes in Peter Constable's proposal.
Your suggestion would break every Hebrew document in the world. Whereas
the proposal that has been submitted only impacts the narrow, but
important, world of Biblical Hebrew.

My guess is that the majority of Biblical Hebrew corpus is not yet in
Unicode format. Additionally, I would contend that writing a converter
to change to a new format, when it is approved, would be a trivial task.

Regards,

Paul

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com] 
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2003 7:44 AM
To: Paul Nelson (TYPOGRAPHY)
Cc: Biblical Languages; Kirk Lowery; hancock at dircon.co.uk
Subject: Re: [Biblical-languages] Unicode proposals for apparatus
symbols, Biblical Hebrew

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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