From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2003 - 19:57:56 EDT
John Hudson wrote:
> At 02:36 PM 6/25/2003, Michael Everson wrote:
>
> >Write it up with glyphs and minimal pairs and people will see the problem,
> >if any. Or propose some solution. (That isn't "add duplicate characters".)
>
> Peter Constable has written this up and submitted a proposal to the UTC.
And I hate to have to continue being Mr. Negativity on this
list, but I remain unconvinced that the proposed solution
(of cloning 14 Hebrew points and vowels) just to fix an
unpreferred canonical reordering result represents the
sole remaining alternative. In this case, I believe the
side-effects of the proposed medicine are worse than the
disease itself.
For example, the alleged problem of the vocalization order of
the Masoretes might be amenable to a much less drastic
solution. People could consider, for example, representation
of the required sequence:
<lamed, qamets, hiriq, final mem>
as:
<lamed, qamets, ZWJ, hiriq, final mem>
and then map <qamets, ZWJ, hiriq> to the required glyph
to get the hiriq to display to the left (and
partly under the following final mem).
The presence of a ZWJ (cc=0) in the sequence would block
the canonical reordering of the sequence to hiriq before
qamets. If that is the essence of the problem needing to
be addressed, then this is a much simpler solution which would
impact neither the stability of normalization nor require
mass cloning of vowels in order to give them new combining
classes.
Effectively what would be needed would be an agreement by
Biblical Hebraicists on a text representational convention
using existing characters. By doing so, they would gain both
the required orderings and the ability to make the distinctions
they want.
If use of a ZWJ (or something similar) seems alien to
Hebrew specialists, then, as always, the details can be
hidden behind the details of input method and keyboard
front ends. The use of a ZWJ should not impact searches
on data (if the searches are properly implemented), unless
the search is explicitly concerned about the distinctions --
in which case there actually *is* a difference in the text
representation which can be searched for.
The problem of combinations of vowels with meteg could be
amenable to a similar approach. OR, one could propose just
one additional meteq/silluq character, to make it possible
to distinguish (in plain text) instances of left-side and
right-side meteq placement, for example.
--Ken
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