RE: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Jul 25 2003 - 15:10:15 EDT

  • Next message: Kenneth Whistler: "Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew"

    > To: <unicode@unicode.org>
    > Subject: RE: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew
    Kent asserted in response to my comment:

    >> Exactly. And frankly, I am finding it difficult to understand
    >> why people are characterizing the CGJ proposal as a kludge
    >> or an ugly hack.

    > I find the entire idea with CGJ (for any use) a kludge...

    But why? I've given a whole series of reasons explaining why
    insertion of CGJ would resolve the problem at hand without
    requiring any new encoding, without cloning any new Hebrew
    points, and without destabilizing normalization.

    Detractors come back with, essentially, "I don't like that
    because I don't like that."

    How is "discovery" that CGJ has the ideal set of properties
    to deal with the current problem any more a kludge than
    "discovering" that ZWJ/ZWNJ could be used to deal with
    ligation control as well as cursive joining, even though
    ligation was not part of their original definition?

    For that matter, many characters originating as control
    functions for hardware have morphed in usage over time,
    as the nature of software and its requirements have
    changed. I suppose TAB, CR, LF, and FF are kludges, too,
    but they have been put to new purposes as appropriate
    over the years.

    >
    > A possible solution to the particular problem at hand that
    > hasn't yet been mentioned (that I've noticed), is to use the
    > already encoded vowel characters for the most part (also
    > for biblical texts), but use new "biblical" vowels only for the
    > occurrences where they occur as *second* vowel (with an
    > implied invisible consonant): HEBREW SECOND VOWEL HIRIQ,
    > etc. (Strikes me as rather elegant, though it requires the
    > addition of new characters.)

    Now *that* is a kludge! ;-) For all of the reasons that Ted
    Hopp immediately threw at it. It makes too many assumptions
    about the potential scope of the problem (which combinations
    are actually extant, for example), which will inevitably
    lead it back to being the same as the original proposal
    to just recode the entire set of vowel points.

    --Ken



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