Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 21/01/2004 04:59, Trevor Peterson wrote:

> ... Since 
> Unicode was designed primarily to meet the needs of living language 
> communities, ...
Primarily, maybe, but the need to represent ancient texts has always 
been an important secondary consideration. SIL is also interested in 
some ancient texts, primarily but not only in Greek and Hebrew.

> ... it makes sense that SIL would get involved with Unicode. I would 
> say that this is not a need that extends to the interests of most Semitists. ...
But Semitists do deal with living languages: Hebrew, Arabic, 
neo-Aramaic, Amharic etc, modern South Arabian. Or they should - they 
ignore at their peril modern Semitic languages.

> ...What Semitists do need (sometimes) is a way to produce the native scripts of 
> the languages they work with. This is mostly for publishing purposes. 
> Obviously, a publisher of an edition of the Hebrew Bible, for instance, needs 
> to be able to print in Hebrew script. Arguably, a lexicon is another such 
> situation. But there are several good ways to meet this need. For example, 
> Makor, which is designed to work with Lambda/Omega, can produce high-quality 
> Hebrew text from MCW input. Since the complete text of BHS happens to be 
> available as a free download in MCW, this is a useful system. (I asked you a 
> while back if there was a freely available Unicode text of the Hebrew Bible, 
> and as I recall, there was none. ...
Well, unless you are talking about several years back, your recall 
incorrectly. There are now at least three freely available Unicode texts 
of the Hebrew Bible, from http://www.anastesontai.com/, 
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/, and 
http://whi.wts.edu/WHI/Members/klowery/eL/index_html. It is also 
possible to convert MCW texts to Unicode; I have a draft converter which 
I can make available if anyone would like it.

> ... This, BTW, is one of my considerations in all 
> of this--if I am starting a dissertation right now that will probably require 
> me to quote frequently from the Hebrew Bible, should I enter everything 
> manually so I can take advantage of Unicode?) For more general communication, 
> it is not so important to be able to use native script. ...
Maybe not important, but if e-mail means that we can't do what we were 
able to do in the days of pen and paper, it's a step backwards. Did 19th 
century scholars use transliteration in letters they sent to one 
another? I doubt it. Why should we put up with less for e-mail, and on 
this list?

> ...
>
> > f Semitists have got on
> > without such devices, it is only because they have not tried to
> > reproduce BDB with computer technology but have allowed their
> > publications to be less multi-script than they used to be.
> >    
>
> As I say, I'm pretty sure that Sokoloff did not use Unicode in producing his 
> second dictionary. I might add that Peter Daniels has worked extensively on 
> producing fonts, for the express purpose of publishing in multiple scripts. 
> When he says that Unicode is not necessary for Semitists, he is speaking from 
> a knowledge of what it takes to publish with computer fonts.
>  
Daniels is speaking from a lack of proper understanding of Unicode, as 
is clear from the archives of the qalam list 
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/). But he is right: Unicode is not 
necessary. It is just very useful.

> > It would be interesting to speculate whether limitations of computer
> > (and, earlier, typewriter) technology have driven the general 20th
> > century move to use more transliteration. But I can name at least one
> > work in which Hebrew was transliterated rather than written in script
> > because of computer technology limitations (of 15 years ago): my MA
> > dissertation from London Bible College, in which I was able to use Greek
> > script but was forced to transliterate the few Hebrew words I used.
> >    
>
> This is hardly the case in more recent work, probably very little of which has 
> had a chance to take advantage of Unicode. If you had to transliterate, 
> presumably you did not have a Hebrew font. When I wrote my thesis in seminary 
> a few years ago, I did not have the use of Unicode, but I had little trouble 
> producing a good-quality Hebrew script. While there have been clear cases of 
> publishers avoiding script, probably in at least some cases to save money, 
> Unicode is hardly the only solution.
>
>  
I have never claimed that Unicode is the only solution, nor even that it 
is the best, but that it is the one which is already most widely 
supported and will soon be more or less universal.


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