On Thursday, July 31, 2003 4:58 PM, John Hudson wrote: > At 01:18 PM 7/31/2003, Ted Hopp wrote: > > >There are exactly two Hebrew vowels that are spacing glyphs: holam male and > >shuruq. Neither one is encoded in Unicode. Neither one is a Hebrew letter > >(in the traditional sense) nor is either a combining mark. I thought some > >new nomenclature was in order. Since there are general category Lo code > >points with names like LAO VOWEL SIGN AA [0EB0], I went with that. (Maybe I > >shouldn't have dropped the "SIGN".) > > > >It seems wrong to be calling a base character a HEBREW MARK. It also seems a > >little odd to be calling a Hebrew vowel a HEBREW LETTER when every other > >HEBREW LETTER is a consonant. But if that's what convention requires.... > > Weingreen, _A practical grammar for classical Hebrew_ (2nd ed., Oxford, > 1959, pp.6-7) records yod, vav and he sometimes being used for common vowel > prior to the development of the point system, in addition to their usual > consonantal role: > > he = short a > yod = short e and short i > vav = short u and short o > > Weingreen uses the term 'vowel-letters'. > > My Hebrew knowledge is nowhere near good enough to judge the accuracy of > Weingreen's explanation nor terminology on this issue.
Yes, I did overstate things a bit there. Weingreen is right, but "vowel-letters" isn't standard terminology that I know of. Those vowel-letters continue to be used even with pointing. Today, the combination of a hiriq followed by a yod (with no vowel) is called a hiriq male; a tsere-yod is called tsere male. Vav as a short u is called shuruq and as a short o is called holam male. There's no special name that I know of for a patah-he combination used for a short a (which only occurs at the end of a word, by the way). I believe alef and possibly ayin are also sometimes used to indicate vowels in unpointed Hebrew (certainly in Yiddish). The only one that brings typographic problems is holam male. I suppose one could think of hiriq-yod, tsere-yod, and patah-he as individual vowels that are both combining and spacing glyphs. I wasn't, though. 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/
