On Thursday, July 31, 2003 2:31 PM, Jony Rosenne wrote: > This argumentation applies equally well to th (which should be at least two > Unicodes in English), gh (how many?), etc. > > Jony
How so? Holam male has different semantics, different pronunciation, and different typography from consonantal vav with holam haser. The distinctions cannot be maintained in text encoded with Unicode. The same arguments (especially the point about Unicode erasing distinctions) do not apply to th and gh. Nobody (at least, no native English speaker) thinks of th or gh as single characters, either. (You might have a little more luck if you tried ch, ll, and rr in Spanish. But then, of course, your argument would be weaker because the devil's advocate position wouldn't be as silly.) The full argument also does not apply to the case of shuruq vs. vav with dagesh (semantics and pronunciation yes, typography no). Notice that nobody's making a lot of noise about shuruq. So we can just shrug our shoulders and say that nobody should care and so be it. Or we can look to a solution. The cleanest one (to my way of thinking) is to add a character to Unicode. I strongly prefer adding a holam male (base) character as opposed to adding a new combining mark. The only alternative proposal that seems to make some sense is to leave the Unicode characters as they are and adopt the usage convention that a Hebrew consonant combined with a holam haser (and possibly other marks, but not other vowels) followed by a vav with no combining marks (including no teamim, except maybe 05C4, if anyone can say what that's for) should be interpreted as the consonant followed by a holam male. However, this has its own problems, such as requiring extended contextual analysis (possibly including a look-ahead to the end of a word) to resolve the meaning of an encoding. We'd also need to figure out how to handle creating a holam male at the start of a line, surrounded by spaces, etc. We'd have to give up on the possibility of writing one holam male after another in any simple way. If it can be made to work under those conditions, it may be a viable alternative. Ted Ted Hopp, Ph.D. ZigZag, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-301-990-7453 newSLATE is your personal learning workspace ...on the web at http://www.newSLATE.com/
