From: Jony Rosenne (rosennej@qsm.co.il)
Date: Fri Nov 26 2004 - 13:05:58 CST
Normal printed text is hardly ever plain text. It contains headings,
highlighted phrases, paragraphs etc.
The Hebrew Bible has its unique non-plain text artifacts, such as
Ketiv/Qere. If standardization is necessary, take it to the SGML people.
Simple cases of Ketiv/Qere can be managed without mark-up, for example when
the vowels of the Qere happen to fit the Ketiv, but this is not a general
solution nor does it imply that it is not a markup item.
Jony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Peter Kirk
> Sent: Friday, November 26, 2004 2:12 PM
> To: Mark E. Shoulson
> Cc: Dean Snyder; Unicode List
> Subject: Re: No Invisible Character - NBSP at the start of a word
>
>
> On 26/11/2004 03:40, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
> > ...
> >
> > I think part of what makes Biblical Hebrew so contentious is the
> > unstated assumption that "the BHS text of the Bible *must* be
> > considered plain-text." It's not necessarily so. It isn't
> > necessarily a bad rule to work with, but it isn't one we
> should take
> > for granted, and it's one we do need to examine and consider.
>
>
> I understand that this is not self-evident. But let's look at the
> arguments. The word forms which by my contention should be
> supported as
> plain text are the ones actually found, not just in a single Bible
> edition, but in Hebrew Bible manuscripts from the 10th
> century CE and in
> all printed editions, except perhaps for some simplified ones, until
> today. (Some of the special features which have already been
> accepted by
> the UTC, such as right METEG, are found in only some such manuscripts
> and editions, but this is not true of the Qere/Ketiv blended
> forms.) And
> the distinctions made have real semantic significance, they are not
> simply layout preferences. As I understand it, Unicode intends to be
> able to represent the semantically significant features of texts in
> general use. This is clearly a text in general use, and the special
> formatting features of it are semantically significant.
> Therefore they
> should be represented in Unicode.
>
> It is true that these special formatting features have a complex
> relationship to the actual phonetic realisation of the text,
> and can be
> fully understood only in conjunction with the marginal notes. But
> Unicode has never been intended to represent the phonetic
> realisation of
> a text, and it has certainly not been restricted to
> characters which are
> part of that phonetic realisation. The criterion for a
> Unicode character
> is not that it has a distinct sound, but that it has a distinct, and
> semantically significant, written form. These Qere/Ketiv
> blended forms
> are the actual written forms in the text, and as such,
> irrespective of
> how they might be pronounced or not pronounced, they are the
> ones which
> Unicode needs to represent.
>
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter@qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 26 2004 - 13:06:29 CST