Re: Biblical Hebrew

From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 18:52:32 EDT

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    Ken wrote...

    > I now like better the suggestions of RLM or WJ for this.

    I'll have to disagree with Ken. I'm not so sure about either of these. I
    don't think anyone has, in the past, considered what conforming or
    non-conforming behavior would be for a RLM or WJ between two combining
    marks. This needs a bunch more study to determine what on earth it would
    break in existin implementations.

    On the other hand, ZWJ between two combining marks has at least been
    discussed, and in the case of Indic anyway, it has known, documented
    effects.

    > > At least with
    > > having distinct vowel characters for Biblical Hebrew, we'd come to a
    > point
    > > we could forget about it, and wouldn't be wincing every time we considered
    > > it.
    >
    > Au contraire. We'll be wincing forever for this one. There's
    > no way of getting around the fact that this is merely a cloning
    > of a the whole set of points in order to have candidates for
    > a reassigned set of combining classes.

    I'll weigh in to agree with Ken here. The solution of cloning a whole set
    of these things just to fix combining behavior is, to understate, not quite
    nice.

    The *best* thing to do, in my personal opinion and I know it'll get shot
    down so don't bother telling me so, is to fix the combining classes of the
    Hebrew points.

    Since the combining classes can't be fixed because we have the
    normalization-stability albatross firmly down our gullets and will forever
    be choking on that, the next best thing is to use a ZWJ. Problem solved.
    Just document it.

            Rick



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