Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 9/13/05, Ken Penner wrote:
> Does anyone know if the Babylonian vowel marks been proposed 
> or approved for the Unicode standard?

Do they need to be? I would suppose first that such marks would also
include Babylonian cantillation marks, and also Israeli vowel and 
cantillation marks, as well as various extensions to the Tiberian 
system?  But is a Babylonian etnax that different from a Tiberian 
etnax?  I think it might end up better, rather than dealing with all
the additional marks this would indicate, to have only a few additional
marks, mainly for extended pointings used by the Tiberian system,
for both vowels and cantillation.  Since the Tiberian system is in
many senses a superset of the other systems, then where it is a
superset of Israeli or Babylonian vowel or cantillation marks no new
sign should be added.  Just where it is not a superset, where there
is an extension in the Babylonian or Israeli or even in a variant of
the Tiberian, then there should be a variant symbol.  And if you
want to switch between the various systems, just switch fonts.

In any case, if they had been approved, you'd probably see them
on http://www.unicode.org/charts/

Best,
Yitzhak Sapir