Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>]

Peter wrote:

> Now the relics of these non-standard 
> transliteration fonts 
> are causing no end of trouble. Literally. I and my former SIL 
> colleagues 
> have spent man-years trying to sort out the incredible mess 
> that these 
> old practices have caused, every person doing what is right 
> in their own 
> eyes, and there is no end to the task in sight.

Could you be more specific about what the problems are? I'm truly curious to 
know.

[snipped]

> If all the Hebrew users in the world (biblical scholars, 
> Israelis, Jews 
> around the world, etc) could get together and make their own 
> decisions 
> on a single technology which they could all use, that would 
> be fine, as 
> they could then share their data.

Who says they need to? Why do I need to share data with an Israeli physicist? 
This is why I say that I think Unicode has its place, but not necessarily for 
every field that needs to work with Hebrew script.

[snipped]

> How about communicate with Hebrew users in Israel and with Jews 
> worldwide?

Again, I haven't tried to say that Unicode isn't useful for this purpose. But 
not being a speaker of Israeli Hebrew, I don't personally have much use for 
it; and although there are certainly Israeli scholars working in my field, 
that doesn't make their national encoding any more intrinsically necessary 
for my work than if they were Chinese.

> How about communicate with colleagues who prefer SIL Ezra 
> while you are using SP Tiberian, or vice versa?

Working in what capacity? If it's simply a matter of e-mailing back and 
forth, we can get by with whatever is available. We can transliterate 
according to accepted standards, we can depend on each other's access to 
basic texts, we can use Unicode if that seems to work for everyone, or we can 
agree on a common font. If it's a matter of publishing, we'll all have to 
conform to the publisher's standards, whatever they might be. If the 
publisher wants camera-ready material, it doesn't matter how we generate it.

> How about make use of 
> the large range of Unicode fonts which are already available 
> (though not 
> many support accents properly yet)?

If there are good fonts available otherwise, what difference does it make?

> How about use all the nice Hebrew 
> language support provided by OSs and standard software?

Like what? A spell-checker for Biblical Hebrew?

> How about 
> getting proper bidirectional behaviour e.g. word wrapping 
> with RTL text 
> instead of being able to view text only in a fixed width 
> window because 
> all line breaks have to be hard coded?

With good typesetting software that accepts LTR transliteration input, this 
is not an issue.

> Is that enough reasons?

Not that I can tell.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics