From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Nov 26 2004 - 18:28:24 CST
From: "Jony Rosenne" <rosennej@qsm.co.il>
> One of the problems in this context is the phrase "original meaning". What
> we have is a juxtaposition of two words, which is indicated by writing the
> letters of one with the vowels of the other. In many cases this does not
> cause much of a problem, because the vowels fit the letters, but sometimes
> they do not. Except for the most frequent cases, there normally is a note
> in
> the margin with the alternate letters - I hope everyone agrees that notes
> in
> the margin are not plain text.
Are you making here a parallel with the annotations added on top or below
ideographs in Asian texts, using the ruby notation (for example in HTML)
which may also be represented in plain-text Unicode with the interlinear
annotation?
Are you arguing that interlinear annotations are not plain-text? If so why
were they introduced in Unicode?
The notations in questions are not merely presentation features, they have
their own semantic which merit being treated as plain-text, because their
structure also ressembles a linguistic grammar, not far from the other
common annotations also found in Latin text with phrases between parentheses
or em-dashes.
Plain text is widely used since ever to embed several linguistic levels,
which are also often represented too in the spoken language, by variation of
tonality. The content of these annotations is also plain text. The graphic
representation itself is not that important, it is just there to easily
demonstrate the relations that exist between one level of the written
language and the annotation language level.
If a text appears to mix these levels, there's no reason not to represent
it. These annotations are present in the text, there must be a way to
represent them in its encoding, even if it implies encoding mixed words
belonging to different interpretation levels (such as Qere and Ketiv texts
in Biblic Hebrew).
You are arguing against millenia of written language practices, just too
much focused on the common Latin usage where many concessions to your
intuitive model have already been integrated into Unicode (think about the
various characters that have been added as symbols or special punctuations,
or about other annotations added on top of Latin letters such as
mathematical arrows...
I see less problems with the correct representation of Ketiv and Qere
annotations mixed within plain text, and rendered as supplementary letters
on top or around the core Hebrew letters, than with the representation
concessed to the Latin script for various usages (including technical
annotations or punctuations, or formatting controls...)
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