From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Sat May 29 2004 - 09:33:41 CDT
> From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk@qaya.org]
> Well, this does not deal with the scenario which I had in mind, and
> clearly presented some time ago, in which users are searching the
> Internet, or some private but extensive collection of texts, for a
> particular word or phrase, in Hebrew or for that matter Moabite etc or
> even Phoenician. Currently such a search would need to match Hebrew
> characters and also a variety of Latin transliterations. (Hopefully
over
> time the use of Latin transliterations will fade, or at least become
> more standardised as transliterators can use real Unicode characters
> with diacritics and not ad hoc ASCII-based solutions.) But if
Phoenician
> is separately encoded, and at least some palaeo-Hebrew, Moabite etc
> texts are represented with the Phoenician characters, searchers will
> need to search for an additional encoding. For that matter, searchers
> for texts written with Phoenician glyphs will also be inconvenienced
> because some such texts will be represented by Hebrew characters. In
> such a case the user cannot convert all texts to Hebrew characters in
> advance, the folding must be applied by the search engine.
>
> Is this a realistic scenario? Is it one which really requires folding
> together of Hebrew and Phoenician? What does anyone else think?
Sure, that's a realistic scenario. But it takes about 1 extra second to
type abc OR def rather than just abc as the search criteria, and that
achieves the desired result.
I don't think the use of Latin transliterations will fade all that
quickly.
Peter Constable
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