On 05/11/2003 11:11, Language Analysis Systems, Inc. Unicode list reader
wrote:
Here are my suggestions for Really Stoopid but unquestionably
conformant, needs-no-new-characters-can-be
made-to-work-today, alternatives:
Medial meteg: < CGJ, hataf patah, CGJ, meteg >
or
Medial meteg: <hataf patah, CGJ, CGJ, meteg >
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. ...
Yes, you are right. We started discussion on the main Unicode list, and
then moved on to the separate Hebrew list. Discussion has continued on
and off, mainly on the Hebrew list, and should really continue only
there. Rich, you are welcome to join us there.
... 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. 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.
I proposed this some months ago for the same reason. I think there were
two objections. One is that medial meteg is the high-runner in only some
texts, but in other versions of the same text only left meteg is used.
But that is more a difference of typographic convention. I looked at
this one in a posting to the Hebrew list today, which I will forward to
you. The other objection is that CGJ is not supposed to affect the
appearance of the text. But if it does not, we need another character
which does, but which can also appear between two combining characters.
The discussion here seems to be suggesting that the left meteg is the
high-runner case. If this is the case, my own uninformed opinion would
be that you'd probably have to encode a new character. Using CGJ to
encode the distinction in either of the ways shown above seems to be
stretching the use of CGJ a little too far, and sticking ZWJ in the
middle of a combining character sequence seems to open the door to bad
things. You could, I guess, encode left meteg as <hataf patah, meteg>
and medial meteg as <hataf patah, CGJ, meteg>, but this doesn't seem
very intuitive.
I'll shut up now...
--Rich Gillam
Language Analysis Systems, Inc.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
