On Thursday, July 31, 2003 10:00 AM, Peter Kirk wrote: > Ted, if we are to encode separately the dot in holam male, what would > you call that dot? We can't call it holam male because that is the name > of the combined vav and holam. But if that causes a difficulty, that > shows what the problem is. This dot is not a different character from a > regular holam, it is the same one positioned differently, because it > logically precedes the character above which it happens to sit. > > I note, from the Unicode standard version 4.0 section 2.10 > (http://www.unicode.org/book/preview/ch02.pdf), that some combining > characters are encoded according to their logical and pronunciation > order although this does not correspond to their visual positioning. > Perhaps holam should be considered as a similar special case, with vav > as it already is with alef.
I think of holam male as an indivisible glyph that happens to look like a vav with a dot centered above it (or above its stem, if you will, but that's just how it might vary from font to font). It's much the same as a lower-case 'i' not being a dotless i glyph with a combining dot. (Sometimes an 'i' is just an 'i'.) I wouldn't call the dot anything but a dot, certainly not a holam male. Let's encode Hebrew, not dots. It may mean changes to what SIL, UniScribe, and others are doing, but there's no free lunch here. 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/
