Dear Jony,
you claim two things at a time:
(a) only a few academics can distinguish dagesh from shuruk
(b) all Hebrew speakers write and read the two without difficulty.
Since dagesh doubles waw into /ww/ and shuruk transforms waw into
/u/, "all Hebrew speakers" must know the difference in practice.
Because the two marks have different names they even learnt the
difference, hence know it in theory, too. So, (a) is proven wrong.
Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
>
> Dear Arno,
>
> of course people here know how to read pointed Hebrew, in spite of the fact
> that you consider it difficult, but they also know that the two dots are
> identical. Who will teach them to distinguish the undistinguishable? ...
If the two were indistinguishable, reading _would_ be difficult,
but it is not.
And the two dots are not identical. They perform different
functions, and they are place in good typography differently. Even
if 99% of typography is "not-good" Unicode should not just allow
us to encode "Common Israeli" but "Classical Hebrew" as well. :-)
> At 20:37 12/07/99 +0200, Arno Schmitt wrote:
> >Jonathan Rosenne schrieb:
> >>
> >> Dear Arno,
> >>
> >> How can you disunify what only a few academics can distinguish? Who will
> >> then do the typing?
> >>
> >Everybody who speaks Hebrew knows the difference between /ww/ and
> >/u/.
> >So to _write_ dagesh (that turns /f/ into /p/, /ch/ into /k/, /s/
> >into /ss/, /w/ into /ww/) or shuruk (that turns /w/ into /u/) is
> >very simple. To _read_ that in bad typography (based on imprecise
> >encoding) is more difficult.
> >
Rosenne wrote:
> How much real life partially pointed texts have you seen?
I have not seen a lot. But I have seen quite a few unpointed
texts. Are you denying that most Israeli texts are unpointed
(except for uncommon names)?
A guess you are just questioning my credentials. Of course, you
read more Hebrew texts than I do. But _sometimes_ an outsider sees
things more clearly. And Hebrew belongs not to the SII. I think it
is no coincidence that many Jewish and Christian Bible (and Prayer
Book) projects just ignore the SII/ISO/Unicode encoding of Hebrew,
because it is not good enough for "Classical Hebrew".
Rosenne wrote:
> Dagesh is quite common.
I just checked a couple of books, journals and web pages: not a
single dagesh!
Maybe, you just give some URLs of not-fully pointed Hebrew that
display common Dageshes.
On page 6-20 of TUS V2.0 we read:
"Dagesh [i.e. u05BC] is not a vowel [mark]
... The same base consonant can _also_ have a vowel [mark] ..."
But waw that has a shuruk [i.e. u05BC] can _not_ have vowel mark,
because _in_that_case_ u05BC is itself a vowel mark.
Waw with dagesh CAN have a vowel mark.
Waw with shuruk canNOT have another vowel mark.
Isn't that reason ENOUGH to disunite?
Arno
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