I should probably know better than to jump into this discussion, especially since I really don't know anything about Biblical Hebrew, but I could have sworn that this had been discussed here before. I thought what I remembered people saying was that the medial meteg was the high-runner case and the versions with the meteg on either side were the exceptions.
In the _Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia_ text based on the Leningrad Codex, yes. There was not agreement, though, about whether the medial meteg should be considered the default rendering in the larger body of pointed Hebrew, including Jewish editions of the Tanach, prayer books, etc.
If that were true, you'd get
Medial meteg: < hataf patah, meteg > Left meteg: < hataf patah, CGJ, meteg > Right meteg: < meteg, CGJ, hataf patah >
Simple enough, if it makes any sense linguistically.
This is certainly workable from a font perspective, although it would require careful ordering of lookups. I'd initially tried the same approach using ZWNJ to force the left meteg, but this caused all sorts of problems.
The discussion here seems to be suggesting that the left meteg is the high-runner case.
That is certainly the opinion that most of our Jewish correspondents have voiced. I'm not sure anyone here has the Hebrew printing history expertise to say *why* the left meteg might have become the more common norm: I strongly suspect that it was simply due to limitations in typesetting technology and lack of appropriate sorts in fonts.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I sometimes think that good readers are as singular,
and as awesome, as great authors themselves.
- JL Borges
