Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 19/01/2004 07:45, Trevor Peterson wrote:

> ... Unicode also has some of
> its own design problems, which may prevent it from becoming a universal
> standard. I'm not saying here that it doesn't serve its purpose as far
> as that goes, but it may be overly optimistic to think that Unicode will
> ever be an ideal solution for the needs of scholars. Maybe it will
> someday; I'm not turning my back on it, but I'm also not putting all my
> eggs in the Unicode basket. ...
Indeed Unicode has design problems. But design problems won't stop it 
becoming a universal standard. The major software companies, publishers 
etc are not going to reverse their strategy because of minor problems 
with a few rare accents in one dead language. Unicode is coming, whether 
we like it or not, so we had better get ready for it. We should never 
expect it to be ideal for scholars, and so we need to be ready to work 
round its limitations; nevertheless, it is potential much better than 
any existing solutions.

> ... Regardless, there are still holes in the
> universal coverage of Unicode for all possible needs, so we haven't
> exhausted the need for transliteration to overcome technical
> limitations. ...
The only holes in Unicode as currently defined, related to biblical 
Hebrew, are all rather subtle issues, none of which are dealt with by 
your proposed transliteration, or as far as I know by any existing 
transliteration (although M-C encoding comes close).

> ... (Note, for instance, that all the major ancient language
> e-lists still ask for transliteration.) ...
This is not so much because of technical limitations, more because not 
all list users are prepared to upgrade their software (even when 
upgrades are free) to support Unicode.

> ... For this sort of scenario, a
> system that works on bare-bones character sets and minimal formatting is
> undoubtedly best. I may not like the look of MCW, but it works for its
> purpose. When less precision is required, I'm personally happy to stick
> with a general-purpose transcription system.
>
>  
I agree that MCW is probably what we need for this list right now, but 
not for much longer I hope.


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