From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Mar 26 2004 - 19:02:48 EST
On 26/03/2004 13:31, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> ...
>
>We will probably soon see new characters added to Hebrew because of problems for
>the interpretation of Biblic texts, or simply because the currently used
>characters can't fit with any other symbol or letters borrowed from other
>scripts as they have the wrong character properties for usage in Hebrew.
>
>
Philippe, you are as so often misrepresenting the situation.
As far as I know the only proposals for new characters for biblical
Hebrew which are current or expected in the near future are 1) a
proposal for two characters found occasionally in the text which have
not yet been encoded (lower dot and nun hafukha,
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2714.pdf); and 2) a proposal for
one new accent which has not previously been properly distinguished from
another one (atnah hafukh,
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2692.pdf). These are not being
proposed because of problems of interpretation of the biblical text, but
because of problems in properly representing the text at the glyph
level. There is no possibility of using characters borrowed from other
scripts, and this has never been suggested, although in at least one
font the script generic COMBINING DOT BELOW has been used for the Hebrew
lower dot.
Beyond that, the only additional Hebrew characters I expect to see
encoded are for non-Tiberian pointing systems. Each of these three
systems is almost a separate script - the same base characters but
different sets of vowel points and accents.
I know there is one person who wants to encode new Hebrew characters
which are graphically identical to existing ones but semantically
different. It is unlikely that such proposals will succeed, not least
because in most cases there is no general agreement on the semantic
distinctions. (Compare for example that any proposal to encode a
distinct silent h for French would founder immediately on the lack of
agreement between all dialects about which h's are silent.) The best
principle, for Hebrew and for most other cases, is to encode what is
written i.e. the glyph distinctions, and not what people think it means.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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