[Biblical-languages] qamats qatan and sheva na`

Peter Kirk peterkirk at qaya.org
Thu Sep 4 04:55:03 EDT 2003


On 02/09/2003 13:55, Bearpecs at aol.com wrote:

>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!
>
>
>  
>
There has been some discussion of this issue recently on the Unicode 
mailing list. See the archives at http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/ for 
the last few days of July, thread "Back to Hebrew -holem-waw vs 
waw-holem" - this may be the same as what you found from your search.  
See also http://www.qsm.co.il/Hebrew/Hebrew%20Issues.htm for a mention 
and a summary of what is likely to be Unicode's accepted position on 
this if no further action is taken.

But I think a good case could be made for adding two new characters if 
there is sufficient evidence for their use. I am copying this to Ted 
Hopp who also has evidence. But I think that you will need some evidence 
of consistent use of different shapes, rather than of different usage in 
different books.

Some further evidence: The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon by 
Benjamin Davidson (1848! - reprint by Hendrikson 1981) uses (though not 
always) a qamats glyph in a circle to indicate qamats hatuf (presumably 
the same as your qamats qatan - o-sound).

Meanwhile the Mac encoding you refer to is properly using a private use 
area character for this. In principle you can do the same in other 
applications including MS Word, but you may run into problems because 
the PUA assumes that all characters are left-to-right base characters 
and you need a direction neutral (or right-to-left) combining character. 
But in that case you will need to create your own fonts - sorry.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




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