...
We will probably soon see new characters added to Hebrew because of problems for
the interpretation of Biblic texts, or simply because the currently used
characters can't fit with any other symbol or letters borrowed from other
scripts as they have the wrong character properties for usage in Hebrew.
Philippe, you are as so often misrepresenting the situation.
As far as I know the only proposals for new characters for biblical Hebrew which are current or expected in the near future are 1) a proposal for two characters found occasionally in the text which have not yet been encoded (lower dot and nun hafukha, http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2714.pdf); and 2) a proposal for one new accent which has not previously been properly distinguished from another one (atnah hafukh, http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2692.pdf). These are not being proposed because of problems of interpretation of the biblical text, but because of problems in properly representing the text at the glyph level. There is no possibility of using characters borrowed from other scripts, and this has never been suggested, although in at least one font the script generic COMBINING DOT BELOW has been used for the Hebrew lower dot.
Beyond that, the only additional Hebrew characters I expect to see encoded are for non-Tiberian pointing systems. Each of these three systems is almost a separate script - the same base characters but different sets of vowel points and accents.
I know there is one person who wants to encode new Hebrew characters which are graphically identical to existing ones but semantically different. It is unlikely that such proposals will succeed, not least because in most cases there is no general agreement on the semantic distinctions. (Compare for example that any proposal to encode a distinct silent h for French would founder immediately on the lack of agreement between all dialects about which h's are silent.) The best principle, for Hebrew and for most other cases, is to encode what is written i.e. the glyph distinctions, and not what people think it means.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
