Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Will:

Should not the question be, who on this list is still tied to a mail server
that cannot present UTF-8 encoding?

I originally switched to gmail because the mail service I was using could
show unicode, but not allow me to send same. Today it is UTF-8 compliant.
All the email servers that I know of are UTF-8 compliant. So are there any
members of this list who cannot receive and/or send unicode?

If everyone can receive and send unicode, is there any reason to continue
the transcription scheme?

Karl W. Randolph.

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 6:47 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>wrote:

> 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.