James Agenbroad recently said:
> On Sat, 10 Mar 2001, Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
>
> > Regarding Hebrew:
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Nick NICHOLAS [mailto:nicholas@uci.edu]
> > > Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 10:12 PM
> > > To: Unicode List
> > > Cc: Nick NICHOLAS
> > > Subject: Final letters in Hebrew and Arabic
> >
> > > (1) When a letter with a final variant appears alone --- say as a numeral,
> > > or in discussion of the letter or phoneme --- does it under any
> > > circumstances appear in its final form, or is it always medial?
> >
> Monday, March 12, 2001
> When Hebrew letters are used as numbers, (probably not a current
> mainstream practice) the final forms of kaph, mem, num, pe and ssadhe are
> used to repreent 500, 600, 700, 800 and 900. My source: "Alphabete und
> Schriftzeichen des Morgen- und des Abendlandes. 2. Aufl. Berlin:
> Bundesdruckeri, 1969. Hence my use of German transliterated letter names.
> Use of medial forms would thus change the numeric value; this would also
> mean the final forms could appear in the middle of of a number. Nakanishi
> (p. 32), Daniels and Bright, (p.490) and Van Ostermann (1952, p.120) only
> give numeric values for Hebrew letters through 400. I do not know if it is
> safe to infer from their silence that use of final forms for 500 to 900
> is a seldom used twig of a seldom used branch.
Gesenius' Hebrew Grammer Section 5k doesn't mention these. Instead it says a
preceding taw is used to add an extra 400. It also says that thousands are
sometimes denoted by two dots above the letter, e.g. aleph with two dots is
one thousand.
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
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