Re: Hebrew Vav Holam

From: Ted Hopp (ted@newslate.com)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 19:00:11 EDT

  • Next message: Kent Karlsson: "RE: From [b-hebrew] Variant forms of vav with holem"

    On Thursday, July 31, 2003 6:32 PM, Peter Kirk wrote:
    > We mustn't forget that unusual combinations are sometimes meaningful.
    > For example, there are languages which use Hebrew base characters with
    > Arabic vowel points. We mustn't make these illegal sequences in Unicode
    > without very good reason.

    But we shouldn't introduce the possibility for new, meaningless sequences
    without very good reason, either. A new character is being discussed as a
    minimal change needed to address a specific need in Hebrew. Let's not
    introduce generality for the sake of generality. (Personally, I'd be curious
    as to why there are three characters HEBREW LETTER SHIN, HEBREW POINT SHIN
    DOT, and HEBREW POINT SIN DOT instead of three characters HEBREW LETTER
    SHIN, HEBREW LETTER SHIN WITH SHIN DOT, and HEBREW LETTER SHIN WITH SIN DOT,
    without the need for alphabetic presentation forms for the latter two. Was
    this alternative considered and rejected? If so, the rationale might be
    useful to this discussion.)

    I certainly hope it isn't that people prefer a new combining mark instead of
    a letter because, "Gee, there'll be lots of things people will be able to do
    with this!" Save it for Ken's new block of combining dots. :)

    Ted

    Ted Hopp, Ph.D.
    ZigZag, Inc.
    ted@newSLATE.com
    +1-301-990-7453

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