From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jul 12 2007 - 14:56:24 CDT
John Hudson [mailto:john@tiro.ca]
> You've presumably not encountered Karaite documents written in Arabic
> script with Hebrew pointing.
>
> http://www.tiro.com/John/karaite.jpg
>
> Note presence of both Hebrew and Arabic marks: the former in red and the
> latter in green.
This looks like an interlinear annotation added after the initial
composition in Arabic without them. I think that true Arabic authors would
have used Arabic pointing if they had needed it (they did not because they
know the language by context, and the added annotations seem to be added
there only to help Semitists to transliterate the original Arabic text
correctly to Hebrew or other scripts, or for epigraphic, palaeographic and
compared etymological studies within Semitic texts).
Or they may be present because this text is already a transliteration from
pointed Hebrew to Arabic, made by Hebrew users that did not know how to mark
Hebrew vowels and marks into Arabic in a non ambiguous way.
Supporting this in a renderer will require a font implementing both scripts
simultaneously, something really not easy to make, given that the Hebrew
pointing system is already really complex, and Arabic adds its own
complexity due to joining and ligatures. Finally, Hebrew points may become
ambiguous with mandatory Arabic points, so they would have to adopt an
abnormal positioning (for example the dagesh point).
Can you explain what Karaites were trying to do with such texts? Was this a
language? What is the actual language of this document?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jul 12 2007 - 21:00:37 CDT
