It is just a mark to draw your attention that something requires special
attention. It is used as such a number of times in the Bible. Similar to
underlining in English.
The use for indicating thousands, as far as I know, is not Biblical. The
Bible does not use the system known as Gimatria. So there is no way to
confuse the two uses, it they are at all different.
I don't buy the semantic argument. If it were valid, we would require
the Roman numbers as separate characters, because their semantics is
different. Also the underlining in English has a number of uses - for
emphasis, for headings etc. Do we need two underline characters? An if
we were to have them, who would type them correctly?
Jony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of
> Peter_Constable@sil.org
> Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 11:28 PM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Cc: Joan_Wardell@sil.org; Peter_Kirk@sil.org
> Subject: RE: U+05C4
>
>
> On 01/18/2002 06:02:39 PM Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
>
> >I think it is both.
> >
> >The upper dot has been used in Hebrew for a number of purposes. The
> >exact shape does not matter.
>
> Thanks for responding.
>
> You mention a number of purposes -- are there uses other than
> the hundreds
> mark and the punctum that you are aware of?
>
> The semantics of the hundreds mark and the punctum are quite
> different,
> and it's my understanding that Biblical scholars would want
> to see them
> encoded as distinct characters. Do you know of any arguments
> that could be
> made against adding a new character?
>
>
> - Peter
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------
> Peter Constable
>
> Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
> 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
> Tel: +1 972 708 7485
> E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jan 22 2002 - 17:02:23 EST