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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] State of the art for encoding the sheva-na?

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  • From: Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>
  • To: Efraim Feinstein <efraim.feinstein AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] State of the art for encoding the sheva-na?
  • Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:10:56 -0400

There is no such thing in Hebrew as a sheva-na.

Isaac Fried
Boston University

On Sep 16, 2009, at 5:27 PM, Efraim Feinstein wrote:

Greetings list,

(This message is more concerned with a technical aspect of encoding
Biblical Hebrew, rather than any feature of the language itself. If
this is the wrong list to post, I apologize; Please inform me and I'll
try to find a more appropriate forum.)

The Open Siddur Project is encoding the Jewish prayer book (siddur) in
Unicode text+XML semantic markup. Much of the siddur is Biblical Hebrew
text or written in Biblical or quasi-Biblical Hebrew. Contemporary
careful printings of the siddur, like some contemporary printings of the
bible, typographically differentiate between the sheva na and the sheva
nach.

Unfortunately, Unicode only includes one sheva character. I Googled and
found some discussions from back in 2003 on b-hebrew and on Unicode-ML
on these issues, and it seemed that there was nothing resembling a
consensus back then, and the relevant Unicode committees were reluctant
to add a new character. As far as I can tell, that state hasn't
changed up to and including the not-yet-released Unicode 5.2.

Does anyone on this list encode text that differentiates between the two
characters? Are there any quasi-standard ways to encode a difference
(say, in the Unicode Private Use Area)? If so, how widespread is the
font support?

Thanks,

Efraim Feinstein
Lead Developer
Jewish Liturgy/Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.net
http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org
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