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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] A threat to the integrity of the Hebrew language?

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>
  • To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: Peter Constable <peter_constable AT SIL.ORG>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] A threat to the integrity of the Hebrew language?
  • Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 03:01:48 -0700

On 18/07/2003 10:47, Dave Washburn wrote:

On Friday 18 July 2003 09:49, Peter Kirk wrote:

No, I am not making allegations of another anti-Semitic or anti-Israel
plot. There are no Hamans to be unmasked and hanged. The people involved
have the best of intentions, to provide proper computer support for
biblical Hebrew. But what they propose has the effect of requiring
biblical Hebrew to be encoded on computers in a different and
incompatible way from modern Hebrew. That is, they are proposing to
erect an artificial barrier between biblical and modern Hebrew. The
proposal will also disable existing Hebrew software from handling the
biblical text.


[snip]
Peter,
The problem passages you mentioned strike me as not only trivial, but the kind that should be encoded differently in the first place (with the possible exception of yerushalaim and perhaps a couple of others). Most of the instances of varied metheg placement, for example, look a lot like scribal errors to me. Perhaps the proposers should keep in mind that BHS is based on a single medieval manuscript and includes all of that manuscript's freckles and warts. If we airbrush those blemishes away, most of the basis for this suggestion vanishes with them. ...

Good point. But there are those who, for good reasons or bad, may want to encode the text as it stands in real MSS rather than a cleaned up version. Unicode needs to take their needs into account. That doesn't mean that their proposed way of doing it is a good one.

... Since BH, MishH and ModH all use the same script, it's counterproductive to encode them differently, not to say silly.

When it comes to words like yerushalaim, I have typed this word dozens of times in a regular TTF simply by a little creative use of the furtive patah. Most fonts that I know of include variations on the vowel points in order to align with narrow letters and such, and I would hope that Unicode fonts do something similar. ...

The problem is that they don't. To use good quality legacy fonts all sorts of odd spacing letters have to be encoded into the text, which confuses encoding and layout and means that a particular text is good only in one font, and is not easily searchable. In Unicode such layout matters are separated from the text and become a matter for the font rendering software. It's not quite so easy to fool this software in the way you suggest. Well, my alternative proposal is in effect a way of telling the software how to lay things out, and as such the Unicode purists don't like it much. But at least it works, and gets them out of a hole they have dug themselves into by declaring their previous decisions, including known mistakes, as irreversibly set in stone. It is all very like the Ketiv-Qere problem, where the consonants could not be changed so the vowels had to be kludged in around them.

... So I suspect that the means to resolve these minor issues already exists without creating a whole new set.

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that Microsoft supports further proprietary obfuscation...




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






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