Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

Dora, you should be careful with what Dave wrote because it contains 
misleading statements and factual errors.


On 28/03/2004 21:38, Dave Washburn wrote:

> Then this ain't the place to be.  That's all we use here because of the 
> diversity of mailers that members use.  Some can handle Hebrew script, some 
> can't, so we use ASCII transliteration as the lowest common denominator.  
> It's not an ideal situation, but the good part is, it allows those occasional 
> visitors who don't read Hebrew script to participate as well.
>  

I propose that we use snail mail rather than e-mail because that is the 
lowest common denominator to include people who don't have computers. Or 
perhaps we should send voice messages rather than writing anything for 
the sake of English speakers who don't read English script. :-)

Alternatively, we can try to rise above the lowest common denominator.

> And considering the plethora of Hebrew fonts out there, ...

This is irrelevant. There are international standards for interchange of 
Hebrew text in e-mail, Unicode and ISO 8859-8. Text which is encoded 
according to these standards can be displayed by any standard Hebrew 
font, including (although not very beautifully, as George Somsel pointed 
out re holam) Times New Roman and the other Microsoft core fonts.

> ... trying to settle on 
> one particular one for the whole list would be a major headache, and would 
> exclude those with text-only mail programs.
>  

This is an error of fact. It is quite possible to send Hebrew in plain 
text-only e-mail, as follows: בְּרֵאשִׁית - if you set the character coding 
to Unicode or ISO 8859-8. If a mail program cannot display this, it is 
not because it is text-only but because it does not support Hebrew. 
(Dora, this is what you failed to do in your posting which was supposed 
to be Unicode; Outlook Express does allow you to do so.)

As there are plenty of free e-mail clients now available which do 
support Hebrew, I think it is reasonable to ask those interested in 
Hebrew to install one. After all, if one is really interested in a 
subject one needs to acquire the basic tools for that subject.

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