Re: Biblical Hebrew (Was: Major Defect in Combining Classes of Tibetan Vowels)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 12:38:35 EDT

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    On Friday, June 27, 2003 5:53 PM, Karljürgen Feuerherm <cuneiform@rogers.com> wrote:
    > And in any case this should NOT muck things up which aren't broken,
    > like MH.

    Not breaking Modern Hebrew means not changing the combining classes
    of the characters it uses.

    Adding a distinct set for Traditional Hebrew may then be the only practical
    solution: after all there are many such concessions in ISO10646, which
    did not try to unify Greek and Cyrillic despite these two scripts are
    extremely related...

    With Unicode, there is for now no solution, so scholars will need to develop
    their own "legacy" encoding with distinct mappings to a future ISO10646
    and Unicode standard, and for interoperability with these existing documents
    using this legacy 8-bit encoding, then will come the need to map this
    encoding to a distinct set in ISO10646 and Unicode.

    This would be the end of the nightmare.

    What Unicode will then publish, is a set of *compatibility* equivalences
    between the new diacritics for Traditional Hebrew and the existing diacritics
    for Modern Hebrew.

    I'm curious to see how legacy 8-bit documents are used with Biblic texts...
    Are the current conversion tables (informative in the Unicode database) for
    the ISO and Windows charsets correct with that perspective?

    If so the conversion from these 8-bit encodings to Unicode would be less
    simple than simple mappings, as it would require looking at the place
    of diacritics in the 8-bit encoding to see if they can safely be normalized
    once in Unicode accoding to their relative combining classes.

    -- Philippe.



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