Re: question re: Hebrew accents

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Fri Jan 29 1999 - 09:36:31 EST


       J>Zarqa is basically "above". The detailed positioning rules of
       Hebrew points and accents are too complex and imprecise and are
       of no interest to character standards. Unicode provides just a
       general indication of the placement.

       J>For example, the placement of Dagesh, basically a dot in the
       center of the letter, is affected by aesthetic considerations
       and conventions such that most font makes prefer to have the
       each letter with Dagesh a separate font. Or Sheva, basically
       "below", is moved to the right on some letters.

       I don't think a single character zarqa really is adequate.
       Consider dagesh: as you've indicated, aesthetic considerations
       can require a slightly different position for nearly every
       consonant that it occurs with. Yet, for a given consonant it
       would only ever occur in a single position. The is different
       from the situation with the zarqa/zinor/zinnorit glyph, which
       can appear over a given consonant in more than one position
       with the different positions having different significance. So,
       there are two distinct characters needed, whatever it seems
       best to call them. Indeed, in each case aesthetics require
       careful positioning on a consonant by consonant basis.
       Nevertheless, it is my understanding that two distinct
       characters are needed here.

       Peter Constable
       Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:44 EDT