Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dr. Reinhard G.Lehmann" <lehmann AT mail.uni-mainz.de>]

> Well, if there is a consensus apart from me not to use
> transliteration...

Well, as far as I'm concerned, there is no consensus not to use 
transliteration, and as good as unicode may be, I also do not want it to be 
used in a academic
mailing list.

In my opinion transliteration is still the best way to discuss Biblical / 
Classical Hebrew (and Biblical Aramaic, and maybe Hebrew inscriptions?). 
Please keep
in mind that there might be a discussion about ancient pronouciation of 
Hebrew, or comparison with certain neighboring dialects also in this list. 
And what
will you do with Hebrew AYIN when it derives from old GHAYIN (see Greek 
GAMMA)? Or what about Hebrew ZAYIN / Aramaic DALET, deriving from old 
nw-Semitic DHA
(compare zahab / dhab "Gold")? Include Arabic fonts?

In my opinion it is more important to have a good tranliteration scheme that 
fits in all semitic consonantal phonemes.

Reinhard


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   Dr.  Reinhard G. Lehmann
   Forschungsstelle für Althebräische Sprache
   Fachbereich 02 Evangelische Theologie
   Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
   D - 55099 Mainz
   tel: (+49) 6131 - 39 23284
   mailto: lehmann AT mail.uni-mainz.de
   http home: www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/
   look at: http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/link.html
   look at: http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/KUSATU-dframe.html
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