Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew

From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 15:06:27 EDT

  • Next message: Karljürgen Feuerherm: "Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew"

    On 28/07/2003 23:37, Jony Rosenne wrote:

    >We had a discussion in the SII and the consensus was that we should object
    >to:
    >
    >- any change or addition related to Hebrew that would invalidate existing
    >Unicode data or require its modification or re-examination
    >
    >- any change or addition to Unicode that would make the use of Hebrew more
    >complicated or confuse the common user
    >
    >- any change or addition to Unicode that would require a user of Hebrew to
    >have a higher level of knowledge, e.g. to distinguish between items not
    >commonly distinguished, for example the two meanings of Vav with Holam.
    >
    >- the suggestion to encode Biblical Hebrew separately is unacceptable.
    >
    A further thought on this one. These principles tend to contradict one
    another. The last one, which I strongly support, can only work if the
    common encoding for modern and biblical Hebrew is adequate for both.
    This means that the extensions which are required (and have been
    discussed at length) to support BH have to be added. If not, BH scholars
    and ordinary Jewish readerso of the Bible will be forced to use a
    separate encoding of BH, whether defined by Unicode or not. Fonts
    already released are using PUA characters. We don't want to see that
    kind of thing multiplying.

    So, in my opinion, we do need to make a few small changes so that the
    one encoding is adequate for all Hebrew. If we do these carefully the
    impact on naive Hebrew users will be minimal.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com
    http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
    


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