Re: Back to Hebrew, was OT:darn'd fools

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 10:22:11 EDT

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew"

    Peter Kirk scripsit:

    > This reminds me of the polytonic Greek issue. If I understand correctly,
    > the Greek government decided to do away with the distinction between
    > accents because this was easier to implement with 1960's computers.

    I find that hard to believe, to say the least. Surely ease of
    learning and of use for Greeks was the paramount concern, since the
    distinctions encoded by the different accents have been dead for more
    than a millennium. Imagine if anglophones spoke their language as they
    do today, but wrote it in their best rendering of Anglo-Saxon: saying
    ["wVtSu"sejIz"tr\u] and writing "Sož is žęt žu segst!", or even worse saying
    [t@ di"bVg] and writing "wyrmbeslean".

    > Unicode was forced to backtrack and add a whole extra block for
    > polytonic Greek.

    The block in question is not at all required for polytonic Greek support, and
    was forced on Unicode by its appearance in the pre-Unicode 10646 draft standard.

    -- 
    John Cowan                              jcowan@reutershealth.com
    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              http://www.reutershealth.com
    Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory
    that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.
            --blurb for _Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi_
    


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