RE: Hebrew Vav Holam

From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 15:56:35 EDT

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    Jony Rosenne posted:

    > This argumentation applies equally well to th (which should be at least two
    > Unicodes in English), gh (how many?), etc.

    It doesn't.

    There is normally no difference in appearance of the text for the _th_
    in _thin_, _then_ and _fronthand_. There is normally no difference in
    apearance of _gh_ in _ghost_, _tough_ and _through_.

    Accordingly the argumentation used for Hebrew variants of vav with holam
    does not at all apply equally well.

    The reason for the discussion is there *is* a traditional consistant
    difference in the appearance of Hebrew vav with holam.

    One expects any difference in appearance corresponding to a difference
    in pronunciation to be encoded at the plain text level (unless the
    difference can *always* be algorithmically derived).

    If there were a language using the Latin alphabet that did make a
    graphic distinction between _th_ with two different pronunciations then
    I would expect Unicode to encode this, especially if the the distinction
    for forms were found to have been practised for over a thousand years
    and to still be observed in careful typography today.

    Jim Allan



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