From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Thu Oct 30 2003 - 23:15:19 CST
Peter Kirk wrote:
>
> On 28/10/2003 18:49, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
>> I just finished an Excel speadsheet that shows the Hebrew composition
>> model,
>> and all the problems caused by the canonical order of Hebrew diacritics.
>>
>> In summary, most problems come from consonnant modifiers which have a
>> combining class higher than vowels or vowel modifiers.
>>
>> If vowels had been assigned a null combining class, such problems
>> would have
>> not appeared. The idea of generating a CGJ before all vowels in input
>> methods (and then let a prenormalization process remove unnecessary
>> CGJ in
>> composed strings) seems interesting, as it forces vowels to behave
>> like base
>> characters, but it does not solve all the problem, but only the ordering
>> problem caused by the wrong combining classes 21, 24 and 25 assigned
>> respectively to DAGESH/MAPIQ, SHIN DOT and SIN DOT, that come logically
>> before the vowels (in classes 10 to 20), or vowel modifiers (classes
>> 22, 23
>> and 26).
>>
>>
> Actually rafe, in class 23, and varika, class 26 but not used in
> Hebrew, should be considered consonant modifiers. Rafe basically
> indicates the absence of dagesh, and so these two fit in the same
> logical class.
This may or may not matter, but I should point out that rafe (or
something that looks an awful lot like it) has started to see some use
for other purposes. The very large Artscroll publication house puts a
rafe over a letter which has a "moving" sheva under it (as opposed to a
"quiescent" sheva. I think "shewa mobile" is the fancy term). A
particularly innovative book of Psalms I have uses it precisely the
opposite: to indicate a *silent* sheva, but only for cases where they
think you're likely to make a mistake. It also uses it for non-dagesh
in cases where they think you might get it wrong intuitively.
~mark
Trying to wade through email after ~2days with mail server down. Sorry.
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