From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 16:58:47 EDT
At 01:18 PM 7/31/2003, Ted Hopp wrote:
>There are exactly two Hebrew vowels that are spacing glyphs: holam male and
>shuruq. Neither one is encoded in Unicode. Neither one is a Hebrew letter
>(in the traditional sense) nor is either a combining mark. I thought some
>new nomenclature was in order. Since there are general category Lo code
>points with names like LAO VOWEL SIGN AA [0EB0], I went with that. (Maybe I
>shouldn't have dropped the "SIGN".)
>
>It seems wrong to be calling a base character a HEBREW MARK. It also seems a
>little odd to be calling a Hebrew vowel a HEBREW LETTER when every other
>HEBREW LETTER is a consonant. But if that's what convention requires....
Weingreen, _A practical grammar for classical Hebrew_ (2nd ed., Oxford,
1959, pp.6-7) records yod, vav and he sometimes being used for common vowel
prior to the development of the point system, in addition to their usual
consonantal role:
he = short a
yod = short e and short i
vav = short u and short o
Weingreen uses the term 'vowel-letters'.
My Hebrew knowledge is nowhere near good enough to judge the accuracy of
Weingreen's explanation nor terminology on this issue.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
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