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b-hebrew - Re: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew with Aramaic, Phoenician etc in scholarlypublications

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>
  • To: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew with Aramaic, Phoenician etc in scholarlypublications
  • Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 03:27:45 -0700

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/






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