Re: Hebrew Vav Holam

[Peter Kirk]

On 30/07/2003 20:15, Ted Hopp wrote: On Wednesday, July 30, 2003 7:09 PM, Peter Kirk wrote: On 30/07/2003 15:28, Ted Hopp wrote: Where is a kholam attached to the right of an alef? Well, for a start in every occurrence of ro'sh "head", lo' "not", zo't "this (f.)", vayyo'mer "and he said" and several other common words in the Bible. And I understood these (not the last) were modern Hebrew spellings as well. But just as with holam and vav, the shift takes place only when there is no other point or following vowel with the alef, so e.g. not on bo'u "come! (pl)" (Genesis 45:17 etc). Oh dear. That's what I was afraid you meant. In all those cases, I believe the correct interpretation is that the kholam is attached to the left of the preceding consonant (resh, lamed, zayin, yod, etc.), not to the alef. That the point appears to be over the alef is a typesetter's (or font designer's) decision based on aesthetics, or just irregular typography. It should certainly not be coded that way. (What I mean is: if we had a "right kholam" vowel that combined with its *preceding* base character on the right side--like shin dot--it would still be wrong to encode rosh as <resh-alef-right kholam-shin-shin dot>.) Thanks for the clarification. I entirely agree. The problem is that, as I have realised even more clearly now that I have looked at the facsimile page from L, exactly the same originally applied to holam with vav, and the compound form holam male is logically equivalent to alef with holam above the right i.e. the holam doesn't really belong to the base character. I am now thinking that we need to treat holam as something like the double diacritics 035D - 0362, which are positioned over two base characters and are, if I remember right, encoded between the two base characters. The main difference with holam is that it doesn't appear over both base characters at the same time; rather, it is a rendering choice whether to position it above the left of the first charater, above the right of the second character, or in the middle. Consonants without vowels may be less common, but alef in particular occurs quite often that way. (The name Issachar is spelled with a vowel-less shin.) Certain words just have irregular spelling. Also, if I may ask, where is an example of a medial meteg in a khataf vowel? In BHS this occurs about 78 times. One example is in Leviticus 21:10: . But different printed editions vary widely on this one. 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/ -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/

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