From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Tue Dec 21 2004 - 10:48:31 CST
Jony Rosenne wrote:
>>You did suggest something like this during one of the various Hebrew
>>character debates. But it doesn't hold up well in general. By that
>>logic, we also now need to encode LATIN LETTER U OR V, LATIN
>>LETTER I OR
>>J (both in CAPITAL and SMALL versions), plus LATIN SMALL
>>LETTER LONG OR
>>SHORT S (though we could probably manage to use just U+0073
>>for that and
>>encode SHORT S separately). But I don't think anyone would
>>want such a
>>confusing state of affairs. Spelling things right is hard
>>enough when
>>there's only *one* choice for each letter!
>>
>>
>
>The example isn't relevant. These disunifications are very old - you could
>have added C/G - and the I and U are commonly used for the ambiguous
>characters.
>
>
And Dean's example of Cuneiform characters weren't also "very old"?
Besides, we still have documents from that "very old" time (only a few
centuries ago, hardly old at all. Why, many of them are printed!),
documents which *do* use the glyphs ambiguously. If it's sensible to
encode ambiguous characters, then these are probably the most sensible
cases for it. But it isn't.
"The I and U are commonly used for the ambiguous characters"? Great.
The stemmed version of the cantillation is also commonly used for the
ambiguous character. Nothing you've said here distinguishes the case of
U/V from the one under discussion.
(Actually, the unification of yerah-ben-yomo and atnah hafukh may
actually be older than U/V and I/J. Books were printed with U/V and I/J
not distinguished for quite a long time, certainly into the 17th century
(viz. Shakespeare's First Folio, for a famous example), but the
cantillations were conflated in quite early printings of the
Bible--though not necessarily the earliest.)
~mark
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