Re: Yerushala(y)im - Biblical Hebrew

From: Jony Rosenne (rosennej@qsm.co.il)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 04:09:59 EDT

  • Next message: Peter_Constable@sil.org: "Re: Biblical Hebrew"

    Whatever you do, any new characters designed for solving these problems
    should not be in the Hebrew block. Add a new Biblical Hebrew block, clearly
    labeled as not intended for regular Hebrew use.

    And I suggest that whenever a proposal comes up to the UTC, it would be
    advantageous to involve Israeli Biblical scientists in the review.

    Jony

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
    > [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of John Hudson
    > Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 2:29 AM
    > To: Rick McGowan
    > Cc: unicode@unicode.org
    > Subject: SPAM: Re: Biblical Hebrew
    >
    >
    > At 03:52 PM 6/26/2003, Rick McGowan wrote:
    >
    > >I'll weigh in to agree with Ken here. The solution of
    > cloning a whole
    > >set of these things just to fix combining behavior is, to
    > understate,
    > >not quite nice.
    >
    > No, but would be far from the not nicest thing in Unicode,
    > and there's a
    > really good reason for it. I was originally intrigued by
    > Ken's ZWJ idea --
    > or by a variant of it using some new re-ordering inhibiting
    > character, to
    > avoid overloading ZWJ any further --, but the more I think
    > about it, the
    > more not nice I think it is to force Biblical scholars to
    > carry the can for
    > errors in the Unicode combining classes.
    >
    > Control characters, usually ZWJ and ZWNJ, seem to get
    > proposed as solutions
    > to all sorts of text processing complexities. Some of these
    > are perfectly
    > legitimate and reflect the need of users to be able to to control the
    > display of text in different ways, e.g. by forcing half-forms
    > in Indic
    > scripts. But I don't think control characters should be used
    > as fixes for
    > mistakes, especially not when the distinction is not between
    > two different
    > but equally valid ways of displaying the same text, e.g. as a
    > conjunct
    > ligature or with half-forms, but between displaying text correctly or
    > incorrectly. How many English users would accept a text
    > processing model in
    > which the distinction between 'goal' and 'gaol' relied on
    > insertion of a
    > control character between the vowels? I believe the aim in
    > fixing this
    > problem in Unicode should be to provide Biblical scholars
    > with a good text
    > processing experience, not with awkward kludges, even if that
    > means making
    > the Unicode Hebrew block look weird with duplicated marks.
    > The standard
    > should serve the users, not the aesthetic and organisational
    > sensitivities
    > of the people who design the standard.
    >
    > John Hudson
    >
    > Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    > Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
    >
    > If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
    > are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
    > who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
    > Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
    >
    > - Umberto Eco
    >
    >
    >



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