Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 12:48:17 EDT

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    At 12:34 PM 7/25/2003, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

    > b. a minor political problem (that certain communities of Biblical
    > scholars are badmouthing Unicode because it "can't fix its
    > obvious mistakes")

    Wasn't it Michael Everson who made the comment about fixing obvious
    mistakes? I'm not aware of any Biblical scholars badmouthing Unicode: the
    ones I know who have heard about Unicode are incredibly enthusiastic about
    the prospect of having standardised text interchange for Biblical Hebrew.
    The Society of Biblical Literature has been trumpeting Unicode on their
    website: it is actually a bit embarassing that the level of support for
    Unicode encoded Biblical Hebrew in systems and apps is not quite up to the
    level that the SBL site might lead scholars to believe.

    There are genuine concerns about some aspects of Unicode character
    properties for Biblical Hebrew, and as recent discussion on this list
    indicates there are lots of questions about the best way to encode some
    elements of Biblical Hebrew text. There is a lot of development in this
    area at the moment *because of Unicode* -- because people want to implement
    Biblical Hebrew using Unicode and want to ditch the various non-standard
    8-bit hacks --, so yes there are going to be criticisms and disagreements
    because the standard is underdefined for Biblical Hebrew.

    John Hudson

    Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

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