Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Monday 29 March 2004 10:54, Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 29/03/2004 09:36, Dave Washburn wrote:
> >Peter,
> >I happen to know of at least one person who has a text-only system,
> > accessed by dialup or telnet into a Unix machine that doesn't have the
> > beef to serve up X-windows applications.  There may well be others.  It's
> > not just a Microsoft world out there (thank God). ...
>
> Amen! But I am not referring only to Unicode. Certainly Linux supports
> Unicode Hebrew, and so do recent versions of MacOS though I am not sure
> how good this is yet.

Of course Linux does, that's what I use.  The reference to Unix dialup wasn't 
an oblique reference to myself :-)  I don't know anything about Mac except 
how to spell it, but I use Unicode fonts on my Red Hat 9.0 machine.

> >... There really is a reason why we
> >primarily use transliteration for our discussions here.
>
> I realise that there are some people in this kind of situation at
> present - although I would be surprised if the Unix system is actually
> incapable of processing Unicode plain text. So I would agree that we
> should for the time being use transliteration as well as Hebrew text.

I think Solaris is capable under the X-window system, but the Unix I was 
referring to is the plain-text, command-line variety, which for better or 
worse (probably worse) is still in use out there...

> Another good reason for using Hebrew text is for the mother tongue
> Hebrew speakers on the list. It doesn't exactly make things easier for
> them, or make for better relationships, when we western Christians
> insist on using our script for their language. We wouldn't be very happy
> if they wrote our language in their script, would we?

I don't know if I would or not.  ASCII developed not because of western 
arrogance but because of the limitations of computers.  Granted, those 
limitations are for the most part long past, but just like in Hebrew studies, 
change takes a long time :-)  And while I'm aware that the A in ASCII stands 
for "American," it's not really an unreasonable development since the 
Internet originated in America...had it originated in Israel and been based 
on Hebrew characters, I suspect we all would have learned to adapt in order 
to communicate.  But of course that question is pure speculation on both our 
parts, since that wasn't the way it originated.

-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
Learning about Christianity from a non-Christian
is like getting a kiss over the telephone.