Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>]

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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