On 28/10/2003 18:49, Philippe Verdy wrote:
I just finished an Excel speadsheet that shows the Hebrew composition model,Actually rafe, in class 23, and varika, class 26 but not used in Hebrew, should be considered consonant modifiers. Rafe basically indicates the absence of dagesh, and so these two fit in the same logical class.
and all the problems caused by the canonical order of Hebrew diacritics.
In summary, most problems come from consonnant modifiers which have a combining class higher than vowels or vowel modifiers.
If vowels had been assigned a null combining class, such problems would have
not appeared. The idea of generating a CGJ before all vowels in input
methods (and then let a prenormalization process remove unnecessary CGJ in
composed strings) seems interesting, as it forces vowels to behave like base
characters, but it does not solve all the problem, but only the ordering
problem caused by the wrong combining classes 21, 24 and 25 assigned
respectively to DAGESH/MAPIQ, SHIN DOT and SIN DOT, that come logically
before the vowels (in classes 10 to 20), or vowel modifiers (classes 22, 23
and 26).
This may or may not matter, but I should point out that rafe (or something that looks an awful lot like it) has started to see some use for other purposes. The very large Artscroll publication house puts a rafe over a letter which has a "moving" sheva under it (as opposed to a "quiescent" sheva. I think "shewa mobile" is the fancy term). A particularly innovative book of Psalms I have uses it precisely the opposite: to indicate a *silent* sheva, but only for cases where they think you're likely to make a mistake. It also uses it for non-dagesh in cases where they think you might get it wrong intuitively.
~mark Trying to wade through email after ~2days with mail server down. Sorry.
