From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sun Dec 05 2004 - 16:22:26 CST
On 05/12/2004 00:20, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> John Hudson wrote:
>
>> Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>>
>>> Well, that's the difference under discussion. The "plain text"
>>> would seem to be either the qere or the ketiv (but not the combined
>>> "blended" form), since each of those is somewhat sensible.
>>
>>
>>
>> Is there some place in the standard where it says text must be sensible?
>
>
> No, but I meant "sensible" in the sense of according with the usual
> orthographic rules of the language. Stacking 97 different diacritical
> accents on a single character, for example, would be an abuse of Latin
> orthography and would not thus be "sensible." ...
Mark, you might equally argue that stacking three or four different
diacritical accents on a single Latin character is not "sensible",
because it doesn't seem so to your American eyes. Nevertheless, there
are people who do this, in some languages and in IPA, and so Unicode
needs to support it. You may not like it, but the point of Unicode is to
represent the writing systems of the world as they are actually used,
not to pass judgments on whether what they do is "sensible".
> ... I would say that pointing one text with the vowels of another,
> without regard for discrepencies in character-count, constitutes an
> abuse of the Hebrew orthography, ...
It may appear to your eyes to be an abuse of the orthography, just as to
others's eyes the distinct Qamats Qatan which you proposed seems to be
an abuse of the orthography. Nevertheless, both these kinds of
discrepancies and Qamats Qatan are actually used in a significant number
of publications. Indeed the blended Qere/Ketiv forms are in nearly every
Hebrew Bible written or printed over more than 1000 years. They may be
"abnormal" in some sense, but this is no argument for them not being
representable in Unicode.
> ... and shouldn't be considered "normal" usage that must be supported.
>
> That said, I have nothing against using NBSP and various other tricks
> and winding up supporting this. Even the INVISIBLE LETTER might make
> sense in some settings (e.g. where you have something to be drawn in
> later but the diacritic is printed now, for some reason). Just that I
> don't considere qere/ketiv per se a very convincing argument in a
> plain-text domain.
>
> ~mark
>
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Dec 05 2004 - 16:41:22 CST