Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew: meteg

From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 18:49:12 EDT

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    On 29/07/2003 12:48, Joan_Wardell@sil.org wrote:

    >Meteg to the right does not actually need an extra character, because if
    >CGJ is used to override canonical equivalence and reordering of vowel
    >sequences, the mechanism is already in place to use it in exactly the
    >same way for sequences of vowels and meteg.
    >
    ><snip>
    >
    >
    Joan, I am a little confused by your response which seems to be out of
    order. It seems that I wrote:

    >Meteg to the right does not actually need an extra character, because if
    >CGJ is used to override canonical equivalence and reordering of vowel
    >sequences, the mechanism is already in place to use it in exactly the
    >same way for sequences of vowels and meteg.
    >
    >

    and you replied

    >Peter, I don't think CGJ alone will work, since Meteg in the canonical
    >order must always come after the vowel.
    >If the currently defined meteg is the one on the left of all vowels except
    >hatafs,and central to hatafs, then vowel-CGJ-hataf could be left of the
    >hatafs, leaving us with a need for a right meteg to be defined.
    >
    >Or am I misunderstanding?
    >
    >

    My proposal would be to encode as follows:

    Meteg to the left (standard): vowel - meteg, or its canonical equivalent
    meteg - vowel
    Meteg to the right: meteg - CGJ - vowel
    Meteg in the centre (hataf vowels only): either vowel - ZWJ - meteg or
    vowel - CGJ - meteg

    Or we could vary this by doing what John Hudson has proposed, for hataf
    vowels only:

    Meteg to the left: vowel - ZWNJ - meteg
    Meteg to the right: meteg - CGJ - vowel
    Meteg in the centre (commonest): vowel - meteg, or its canonical
    equivalent meteg - vowel

    But in the latter case we would end up with a possibly undesirable ZWNJ
    between two combining marks - by the way in just six places in the
    Hebrew Bible (according to some data which you sent me last year).

    If we take either of these options, we don't need a special right meteg. 

    -- 
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/

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