Peter Constable wrote:
From: Mark E. Shoulson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]one
Actually, no: some accents go on unstressed syllables. For example, a
dehi could coexist with a qamats-qatan. Psalms 4:2 has a qamats-qatan
on the same letter as GERESH MUQDAM, as do others. Psalms 9:14 has
with a DEHI. Exodus 34:11 has one with a QADMA.
But a *pair* of qamatses, one of each sort? That wouldn't happen.
Precisely why assigning qamats qatan to class 18 would not be
particularly useful: it allows you to distinguish < qamats, qamats qatan
from < qamats qatan, qamats >; it does not allow you to distinguish
differently-ordered sequences of qamats qatan and any other combining marks with a non-zero class.
Well, yeah, but why would I want to make such a distinction?
What I mean is, qamats-qatan should behave as much like qamats as possible. So if I went through and edited my Biblical text to show qamats-qatans in the appropriate places, comparisons and rendering and all should still be the same. If qamats+dehi normalizes to dehi+qamats (I'm too lazy to look up if that's right), then presumably qamats-qatan + dehi should normalize to dehi+qamats-qatan. That way if I set my software, say, to compare qamats-qatan as equal to qamats (i.e. I don't want to make the distinction between the two in searching), my search will work just as well as if I'd never changed my text.
Does that make sense?
~mark
