Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

On 18/07/2003 15:39, Michael Everson wrote:

> I do not prefer either proposal (and I say that in the STRONGEST 
> possible terms). I think we should get IETF to bite the bullet and 
> change the properties of these characters. Discussions with Harald 
> Alvestrand have not been a dead end so far. In WG2, I will oppose the 
> addition of duplicate characters to the standard.
>
> What the Biblical scholastic community has to do is shout LOUDLY "Fix 
> the combining properties of the 17 characters and do it NOW". Please 
> organize yourselves into formal letters with many signatures giving 
> your names and affiliations.
>
> Best regards,

Michael, who is one of the main architects of Unicode, tried to post 
this in response to my posting. I support his attempt to put together 
this petition. It would indeed be the best solution to adjust these 
combining properties so that they properly reflect the requirements of 
biblical as well as modern etc Hebrew. I had understood that this had 
been definitely ruled out, but it now seems that if there is enough 
support for it it might be possible to push this through. Of course we 
don't want to rush this, as we want to make sure that any change 
actually makes things correct.

I still hold that, if such a change is not possible, my alternative 
proposal is significantly better than the one I was responding to.

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