John,
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".)
In Biblical Hebrew, it is possible for more than one vowel to be attached to a single consonant. This means that is it very important to maintain the ordering of vowels applied to a single consonant. The Unicode Standard assigns an individual combining class to every vowel, meaning that NFC normalisation may re-order vowels on a consonant. This is not simply 'non-traditional' but results in incorrect rendering and a different vocalisation of the text. The point is that hiriq before patah is *not* canonically equivalent to patah before hiriq, except in the erroneous assumption of the Unicode Standard: the order of vowels makes words sound different and mean different things.
In order to correctly encode and render the Biblical Hebrew text, it is necessary to either a) never use normalisation routines that re-order marks (which is beyond the control of document authors), or b) re-classify the existing Hebrew marks so that all vowels are in a single class and will not be re-ordered during normalisation, or c) encode new marks for Biblical Hebrew with all vowels in a single class.
There are a few other desirable changes to the combining class assignments for some Hebrew accents, which make rendering easier and are more linguistically logical, but the vowels are the most problematic.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism. - Umberto Eco
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
