> But, as you, Ted, have said several times, we must > support irregular spellings as well as regular ones.
Yes, of course, but there is a limit to how far this desideratum can be carried forward in plain text. And it tends to depend on the principles of the writing system itself. For an alphabet with no accents, it is easy. For English, for example, just rearrange the letters into any old irregular spelling you want: Leticia, Laticia, Latesha, Lateesha, Letiesha, ... just keep on going until you get tired. For an system like Han ideographs, we are mostly talking about a long history of accumulation of variant forms of the characters themselves, and the problem is an encoding conundrum that creates a problem of how many spurious or unusual forms do you encode separately as characters, which have come into the status of validly separate characters, and which should just be treated as glyphic variants of existing characters. For an abjad historically written without vowels, but with a long subsequent history of annotational placement of vowel points, we are walking a fine line here. One the one hand, you could take Jony's position, which can be summed up as encode enough distinctions to match current conventional usage, and use markup for further distinctions. Or you could take the position argued by Ted, Peter, and Joan, that the scholastic texts they are dealing with have their own conventions which make more distinctions required for *plain text* representation. I think that in general the case that Ted et al. are arguing makes sense for the Biblical Hebrew texts, but at some point, the fine detail in manuscript and typographical placement of annotational dots goes beyond what is reasonable to represent in a plain text encoding. As long as we are clear that there *is* a line to be drawn here, we can continue to argue just which side of the holam that line needs to be drawn. --Ken
