Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

Hello, fellow subscribers to the Biblical Hebrew mailing list,

What's the current feeling about using Unicode/UTF-8 encoding for citing
non-English text (e.g., Hebrew [obviously], Greek, Arabic, &c.), or
pronunciations (using IPA symbols)?  Historically, it's been considered
proper to use only 7-bit ASCII in Usenet or mailing lists, but sometimes (as
in the case of this mailing list) it's difficult to do this adequately.

In my own posts to this list in the past, I've attempted to deal with this
by citing original forms in Unicode with a transcription into the "usual"
English representation of the original, hoping that this will satisfy both
the needs of those that can both read and understand the original forms and
also of those that may not be able to see the original characters (i.e.,
can't see the Hebrew/Greek/Arabic/[whatever] text) or be able to undestand
it (obviously, not everyone can be knowledgable about every language that
may be relevant to Biblical Hebrew).

So, I would like to ask if people on this list have issues with reading
Unicode?  To be clear, I am *not* asking whether people can understand
Greek/Arabic/[whatever], but whether they can actually see a cited text as
something other than gibberish.

-- 
William Parsons
μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι.