Dear Arno,
How can you disunify what only a few academics can distinguish? Who will
then do the typing?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Arno Schmitt [mailto:arno@zedat.fu-berlin.de]
> Sent: Monday, July 12, 1999 7:47 AM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: disunifying Dagesh and Shuruk
>
>
> There are some mistakes in the Hebrew encoding or/and the rules on
> pages 6-20f.
> The rule "There is never more than one vowel [mark] for a base
> character ..."
> either has to go or be rephrased to: "A base character (consonant)
> has normally only one vowel mark." I have consulted Jonathan
> Rosenne, and he agrees. The most common example of a letter having
> two vowel marks is the lamed in Bibical "Yerushalaim"; it has both
> the "a" and the "i": qamac and hiriq (and between them meteq)
This rule should be deleted from Unicode. It has nothing to do with
character coding.
> More controversial could be my second point:
> u05BC stands for Dagesh, Mappik and Shuruk
> Dagesh and Mappik are no problem, since they look alike and --
> more importantly -- can not be confused: Mappik occurs only in
> (after) heh, and Dagesh _never_ occurs in heh.
> Shuruk only occurs in/with/after waw, but waw can also have a
> dagesh.
> Some typographers and grammarians (G. Bergsträsser) say shuruk
> should stand higher than dagesh.
> Dagesh and shuruk should be disunified, because they have
> different
> funntions and occur with the same letter -- not like the accent
> mark that has different functions in _different_ languages,
> not like umlaut and diaeresis that in German are used for
> different vowels: the one for a, u, o only, and the other for i
> and e only.
If so, so should the two functions of the English "th". Old English scripts
did make the distinction.
>
> They have different names in Hebrew grammar and -- more
> importantly -- their being unified turns a Unicode rule into a
> false one:
> On page 6-20 we read "Dagesh [i.e. u05BC] is not a vowel [mark]
> ... The same base consonant can also have a vowel [mark] ..." A
> waw that has a shuruk can _not_ have vowel mark, because
> _in_that_case_ u05BC is itself a vowel mark.
>
> Smart software can deal with the present situation (for most
> texts), but Unicode should at least disclose the rule:
> "If shuruk and dagesh have only one code point, damaruk (i.e.
> DAgesh/MAppik/shuRUK) in a waw represents a dagesh, when the waw
> has (another) vowel mark or is followed by a holam gadol (waw with
> holam) or shurek (waw with shuruk). In all other cases -- and in
> Yiddish -- damaruk after waw is presumed to be a shuruk." I say
> "is presumed" because in a _partialy_ "pointed" text exceptions
> are possible, but in real life dageshes are amost only used in
> fully "pointed" texts.
> So far, if we do _not_ add a new Hebrew Point "shuruk".
How much real life partially pointed texts have you seen? Dagesh is quite
common.
> If we get the new Hebrew Point, I propose a rule that takes
> reality into consideratian (reality being existing text encoded
> with unified damaruk, people that can't bother, and software that
> does not store the difference:
> "In texts without a separate shuruk, dagesh can represent shuruk
> as
> well. In these texts the dagesh point in a waw represents a (real)
> dagesh, when the waw has (another) vowel mark or is followed by a
> holam gadol (i.e. waw with holam) or shurek (i.e. waw with
> shuruk). In all other cases -- and in Yiddish -- dagesh after waw
> is presumed to be a shuruk."
>
> My last point is of no operational importance: On page 6-20 the
> Hebrew combining marks are grouped into four categories:
> dagesh,
> shin- and sin-dot,
> vowel points, and
> diacritics (i.e metag, rafe, varika).
> Since rafe is nothing but an anti-dagesh (signaling: this letter
> has
> NO dagesh), rafe should either be grouped with dagesh, or dagesh
> should be grouped with the diacritics.
Rafe and Varika should be unified, even though the function is slightly
different. It is just the Ladino name for it.
>
> Arno Schmitt
>
Jony
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