From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 05 2004 - 22:03:19 CST
Mark E. Shoulson wrote at 7:20 PM on Saturday, December 4, 2004:
>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, and
>shouldn't be considered "normal" usage that must be supported.
Calling ketiv/qere spellings orthographic abuse, abnormal, and not worthy
of support in Unicode is based on reasoning backwards from the faulty
Unicode model for encoded Hebrew, rather than forwards from the Hebrew
script to an encoding model.
From an encoding point of view, ketiv/qere is NOTHING MORE than arbitrary
sequences of Hebrew vowels and consonants, and just as Unicode supports
ANY sequence of Latin vowels and consonants it should have, from the very
beginning, supported ANY sequence of Hebrew vowels and consonants. The
problem lies not in the script, the problem lies in the inadequate
encoding model adopted for it - and it needs to be fixed. ALL of the
Hebrew script must be supported; anything less is simply unacceptable.
As I said similarly elsewhere, this must be supported in plan tixt -
ketiv = "plain text", qere = "all scripts". As I have just demonstrated
this is trivial in Latin; it should also be trivial in Hebrew.
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Assistant Research Scholar
Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
Computer Science Department
Whiting School of Engineering
218C New Engineering Building
3400 North Charles Street
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
office: 410 516-6850
cell: 717 817-4897
www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
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