[Biblical-languages] qamats qatan and sheva na`

Bearpecs at aol.com Bearpecs at aol.com
Tue Sep 2 17:55:26 EDT 2003


Classically, Hebrew orthography does not distinguish between qamats gadol and qamats qatan or between sheva na` and sheva nah.  However, there are a number of venues, particularly prayerbooks and guides to liturgical bible reading, in which printed material makes these distinctions.  In the recent Sim Shalom prayerbook of the Conservative Movement, for example, the qamats qatan is "broken", looking like a horizontal line with a dot under it.  In other cases I have seen qamats qatan distinguished from qamats gadol by a longer vertical line.  In one tiqqun (Torah-reading guide) the sheva na` is distinguished by its larger size from the sheva nah.

1.  Is there (or will there be) any accomodation in Unicode to these distinctions?
>From what I see on an internet search, MAC uses a F87F code to mark "qamats qatan" as a variant of "qamats" to map its Hebrew character set.  But I don't know enough about unicode to understand what that means to me (e.g. for building a Keyman keyboard layout, or inputting a character in MS Word).
My internet search also found an email discussion in the digest for the Unicode Yahoo group, but it did not seem to reach any final conclusion.

2.  If there currently is not, can someone suggest alternatives?  (hopefully that don't involve creating my own fonts)

Thanks!



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