But who then does end up carrying the can eventually, if we go the cloning route? Cloning 14 characters creates a *new* normalization problem, and forces non-Biblical-scholar users of pointed Hebrew text to carry *that* particular can.
...
I think if you really sit down and think about this in the larger context of users of Unicode Hebrew generically, instead of merely the Biblical Hebrew community that you are trying to find a solution for, you may realize that displacing the pain to *other* users may not be the best solution, either.
I think there is a reasonable case to be made for treating modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew as separate languages for pretty much all purposes. The existing codepoints with the fixed position combining classes work fine for Modern Hebrew, and there's no reason that they should not continue to be used for that language. I would seriously entertain the idea of re-encoding *all* the Hebrew marks, along with non-Tiberian vocalisation marks and anything else specifically needed for Biblical Hebrew, in a separate block, and deprecate the cantillation marks in the Hebrew block.
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
