On Wednesday, July 30, 2003 8:21 AM, Peter Kirk wrote: > ... The vowel form, > Ted's holam male, is encoded as holam followed by vav, and the consonant > vav with holam is encoded simply as that.
Encoding 05B9 before the vav to create a kholam male can be a complicated business. Consider the (non-authentic) spelling used in the hugely popular "501 Hebrew Verbs" by Shmuel Bolozky (Barron's), where vowels and ketiv male (plene spelling) are mixed. (This is frequently done for pedagogical applications.) A particularly striking word is borrowers (f): <lamed-kholam male-vav-kholam male-tav>. Under the proposal, that would be encoded [05DC.05B9.05D5.05D5.05B9.05D5.05EA] -- somewhat difficult to parse, if you ask me. There will also be a bad ambiguity for the present, female, plural of borrow: <lamed-kholam male-vav-kholam chaser-tav>. The resulting encoding under the proposal is [05DC.05B9.05D5.05D5.05B9.05EA]. This could also be interpreted <lamed-kholam chaser-vav-vav-cholam khaser-tav> (with the reasonable but incorrect interpretation that the double-vav is to indicate a consonantal vav, analogous to the the past tense, female, second person of borrow: <lamed-qamats-vav-vav-qamats-he>.). How would one interpret: [05E7.05B9.05D5.05B9.05D5]? This is how the proposed scheme would encode a word that appears in Brown-Driver-Biggs under entry I for kavah (qof-qamats, vav-qamats, he). (It should be interpreted <qof-kholam khaser-vav-kholam male>. How'd you do?) It seems to me that it will be difficult-to-impossible to develop a parsing algorithm for this kind of thing, even without considering things like transliterations and other irregular applications. Combining characters should follow their base characters. We just have to live without the kholam male for now (or create it using "markup", which can apparently solve all problems). 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/
