A further thought on this one. These principles tend to contradict one another. The last one, which I strongly support, can only work if the common encoding for modern and biblical Hebrew is adequate for both. This means that the extensions which are required (and have been discussed at length) to support BH have to be added. If not, BH scholars and ordinary Jewish readerso of the Bible will be forced to use a separate encoding of BH, whether defined by Unicode or not. Fonts already released are using PUA characters. We don't want to see that kind of thing multiplying.We had a discussion in the SII and the consensus was that we should object to:
- any change or addition related to Hebrew that would invalidate existing Unicode data or require its modification or re-examination
- any change or addition to Unicode that would make the use of Hebrew more complicated or confuse the common user
- any change or addition to Unicode that would require a user of Hebrew to have a higher level of knowledge, e.g. to distinguish between items not commonly distinguished, for example the two meanings of Vav with Holam.
- the suggestion to encode Biblical Hebrew separately is unacceptable.
So, in my opinion, we do need to make a few small changes so that the one encoding is adequate for all Hebrew. If we do these carefully the impact on naive Hebrew users will be minimal.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
