Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 18/07/2003 12:14, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Presently, unicode encodes the sofit letters, which should be merely 
> alternate glyphs, as separate letters. The same is true of the vowels. Thus, 
> even if I make the glyphs print to screen as paleo-Hebrew, the underlying 
> code will not be what I see. What I want is for the underlying code to be the 
> same as what I see. (Online Bible uses their own unique encoding system, such 
> that they can encode the sofit letters without it messing up the search 
> function in word processors or in their own program. But the sin and shin are 
> different.) Thus, while humans have no problem seeing them merely as 
> different glyphs for the same letters, the computer is too dumb to do the 
> same.
Certainly not! It is not at all hard to program a computer to take 
normal and word final letter forms as equivalent in searches, just as 
capital and small letters are generally taken as equivalent in searches. 
And I think Unicode specifies that this equivalence should be the 
default, though overridable as sometime people will want to search for a 
final form explicitly.

There is a good reason to specify final forms separately as the rules 
for using them have exceptions. See for example the second letter of the 
first word of Isaiah 9:6, in a printed BHS etc. Though Arabic has a 
different mechanism for allowing this. Anyway, there is no possibility 
of changing this convention as it is widely used for modern Hebrew. It 
is of course irrelevant to paleo-Hebrew, but you can use the same glyph 
for final and non-final letter forms.

> If Moses wrote the Torah as tradition avers, then the Phoenecians learned the 
> alphabet from the Hebrews, not the other way around.
>
> Thanks for the references. I?m following them up.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
>
>  
--
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/