Philipp Reichmuth wrote at 10:24 PM on Wednesday, October 20, 2004: >For Semitics at least, this is *not* a "left quotation mark"; people >normally use a left half ring wherever the character is available. >(Take a look at Brill publications, such as the Encyclopaedia of Islam; >Brill's Baskerville variant has a pretty distinct ayin.) The quotation >mark is a substitute only. I guess the only difference in principle >with the Egyptological version is that the Egyptological ayin more or >less has an uppercase form.
The following is a small and quickly generated sample list of publications in which transliterated Semitic ayins are represented by left single quotation marks (and alephs are represented by right single quotation marks): * Thomas O. Lambdin 1971 Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (Harvard University) * Giovanni Garbini 1979 Storia e problemi dell'epigrafia semitica (Oriental Institute of Naples) * Richard E. Whitaker 1972 A Concordance of the Ugaritic Literature (Harvard University) * Zellig S. Harris 1936 A Grammar of the Phoenician Language (American Oriental Society) * Hermann L. Strack 1978 Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Atheneum) * De Lacy O'Leary 1963 Colloquial Arabic (Routledge & Kegan Paul) * Paul Jo�on 1996 A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Pontifical Biblical Institute) * James S. Pritchard, ed. 1969 Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton University) * Choon Leong Seow 1987 A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (Abingdon) * Geoffrey E. Bromiley, ed. 1979 The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Eerdmans) * Johannes Friedrich & Wolfgang R�llig 1970 Ph�nizisch-Punische Grammatik (Pontifical Biblical Institute) In none of these publications can one differentiate between transliterated ayins and left single quotation marks. Of course, there are many publications where transliterated ayin does differ slightly from the left single quotation mark. And there are a goodly number in which an even greater distinction is made. A decision to encode ayin characters needs to be accurately informed by such practices. To my previous list of ayin transliteration candidates already in Unicode, one could also add: 02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
