Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Pere Casanellas <pere.casanellas AT btlink.net>]

Dear Peter Kirk,

I was trying to answer to your invitation to make comments on your proposal 
to encode Holam Male and Vav Haluma, but I could not fint the document 
proposed by Michael Everson. Could you please verify the URL you indicated 
for this alternative proposal? (With the URL you indicated I get a document 
whose title is "Proposal to add Ideographical Description Characters (IDC) 
to the UCS".)

Thanks.

--
Pere Casanellas
E-mail: pere.casanellas AT btlink.net
       pere AT casanellas.com
Treasurer of the Societat Catalana d'Estudis Hebraics
Member of the Associació Bíblica de Catalunya
http://www.abcat.org/
http://www.iecat.net/
http://www.pere.casanellas.com/bible
Barcelona
CATALONIA (Spain)
http://www.freecatalonia.com/

===============================================
At 00:14 01/08/2004 +0100, Peter Kirk wrote:
> Please excuse the cross posting of an announcement which is relevant to 
> members of several groups (and a few individuals receiving blind copies).
>
> I have submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee, in the name of a 
> small group of Hebrew experts, a new proposal for solving the long 
> standing problem of distinguishing between Holam Male (full Holem) and Vav 
> Haluma (consonantal Waw with defective Holem) in Unicode Hebrew texts. You 
> may read this proposal (which is much shorter than the old proposal 
> submitted in June) at http://www.qaya.org/academic/hebrew/Holam3.pdf, or 
> ...Holam3.html. This proposal is based on using the ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER 
> character to distinguish between Holam Male and Vav Haluma. This proposal 
> was based on the consensus preference of a number of experts in ancient 
> and modern Hebrew who contributed to the discussion.
>
> An alternative proposal has been submitted by Michael Everson, a 
> generalist script expert and Indo-Europeanist with little knowledge of 
> Hebrew, and Mark Shoulson, an American Jew. This alternative proposal 
> (which should soon be available at 
> http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2840.pdf but is not what you 
> currently get when you go to that URL) is for a new character for use as 
> Holam Haser (defective Holem) only when used with Vav. This proposal is, 
> in my opinion, based on clear misunderstandings of how the Hebrew script works.
>
> The Hebrew experts involved in the discussions have clearly rejected the 
> principle of encoding a new character for a variant Holam. Nevertheless, 
> some influential people in the Unicode Consortium seem determined to 
> impose on Hebrew script users a new character which they do not want. The 
> alternative may not be rendered precisely correctly with some older 
> rendering engines (but in practice probably can be by any engine which can 
> handle right-to-left script), but it is based clearly on how the Hebrew 
> script works.
>
> I invite all interested parties, especially regular users of Hebrew 
> script, to make comments on the proposal I have submitted, and on the 
> alternative proposal if they are able to find it. Comments should be made 
> directly to the Unicode Consortium via 
> http://www.unicode.org/reporting.html, or by e-mail to human3 AT unicode.org. 
> They should be made before the Unicode Technical Committee meeting which 
> starts on 10th August. I will be happy to receive copies of any comments.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter AT qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
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