Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 19/01/2004 06:04, Trevor Peterson wrote:

> Peter wrote:
>
>  
>
> > And so for the Masoretic 
> > pronunciation 
> > perhaps we have some kind of perpetual Qere, with the 
> > pronunciation as 
> > if there is one lengthened lamed; so we would have unchanged 
> > Ketiv HLLW 
> > YH but Qere HAL.W. YAH.
> >    
>
> This seems like a stretch to me. Wouldn't we expect rather to see no
> nikkud on one or the other lamed? I seem to remember seeing this in
> comparable situations, ...
Yes, you are probably right. The comparable situation you may have seen 
is the extra unpointed shin in Issachar.


> ...
>
> I'm also not crazy about using boldface to indicate consonantal
> lengthening. The problem is that I can't think of an attractive
> alternative. I did consider using caps, but I hate to do that, both for
> the ugly appearance and for the possible confusion with other systems
> that use caps to indicate emphatic consonants (a system that I like,
> BTW, for ASCII environments). If anyone has any suggestions, I'd
> appreciate it. ...
How about a dot above, U+0307? This has the advantage of fitting 
reasonably well with every upper case base consonant, as it can go 
beside the ascenders of b, d etc, and you don't need it on i or j, or f, 
where there might be a problem. See for example the reference glyphs in 
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf, which has most of the 
combinations needed precomposed, even dots above s acute and s caron 
(1E65/1E67). The only remaining problem case is l (small L) with dot 
above; for this you could substitute l with middle dot, 0140.



--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/