Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Peter: 
 
I recognize that what I'm suggesting here has a limited use, namely for 
inscriptions, ostraca and a reconstruction of how Tenakh would have been 
written 
before the adoption of the Aramaic square characters. I have no intention of 
replacing the Masoritic text with all its points and cantilation marks. I 
claim that 
there is room for both. 
 
If all one wants to do is to display the paleo-Hebrew text to the screen and 
printer, 
then one can do as what previous posts mentioned even as I have already done, 
namely give glyphs only to the displayed characters, the sofits having the 
same 
glyphs as the non-sofits and don't worry about the underlying encoding. But 
there 
is also reason to encode the text cleanly in paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician. Let's 
not 
limit ourselves to one or the other. 
 
Karl W. Randolph. 
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com> 
 
> 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. 
> > 
> >Karl W. Randolph. 
> > 
> >   
> > 
> --  
> Peter Kirk 
> peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com 
> http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/ 
-- 
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