From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2003 - 18:38:32 EDT
On 28/07/2003 14:16, John Cowan wrote:
>Joan_Wardell@sil.org scripsit:
>
>
>
>>This lends credence
>>to those of us who are BHS fans and would like to see a visible difference
>>between
>>holem-waw and waw-holem. The most reasonable means of achieving this is to
>>encode the holem before the waw when it is holem-waw.
>>
>>
>
>This argument is unsound. Encoding is essentially autonomous to either
>input methods or rendering methods, and it may demand things that would
>be very unintuitive to the uninstructed user who examines the encoding
>directly. There may be very good reasons for encoding holem-waw as
>other than a holem followed by a waw.
>
>
>
It is not entirely unsound, because in a case like this, where there is
a distinction in the text, the encoding must be such that that
distinction in the text is either explicitly encoded or can be
determined unambiguously (and preferably efficiently, especially for a
rendering algorithm) from the context. In this case the general
algorithm to determine which collocation of holam and vav is intended is
complex (requiring a recursive lookback potentially to the beginning of
the word) and not entirely unambiguous, although there is a simplified
algorithm which will account for all regularly spelled Hebrew words.
The issue of whether the distinction is a real and ancient one or one
introduced by relatively modern editors is entirely independent. It is
certainly older than BHS; for example, the special form of the holam vav
vowel (not at all like vav with a regularly placed holam) is clearly
seen in the facsimile of an 1889 Viennese Bible reproduced by
Haralambous, http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/biblical-hebrew94.pdf,
p.18, second line of text, third word from the left. Anyway, Unicode
should be able to make any distinction which is commonly made by modern
editors. If it were a criterion for inclusion in Unicode that a
character had been in use as a distinct character for centuries, the
standard would be a lot slimmer than it actually is.
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
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