Elaine Keown
Tucson
Dear Curtis Clark and List:
> but the fervor exhibited here makes me wonder what
> the issues *really* are. I am used to seeing such
> fervor among academics only when there has been some
> unstated agenda at work. And so I wonder, are we in
Mr. Clark is right to observe that there is more
happening here than meets the eye.
As I have mentioned (ad nauseam to Rick McGowan
off-list) and intermittently here, there is a great
deal of bad feeling towards Unicode among Semitists
since ~1989 or so. The first time I spoke up *for*
Unicode in about 1995, I was publicly mocked by a very
famous professor.
Leading computational Hebraists in the late 1980s
tried to persuade Unicode planners to include a
non-public but very widely used academic Biblical
Hebrew code, Michigan-Claremont-Westminster, in
Unicode....They were rebuffed (or, if you will,
perceived themselves to be rebuffed).
So the incorrect Tiberian accents and the incorrect
canonical classes, and so forth already in
Unicode--everything discussed also ad nauseam on the
small Hebrew list for 9 months--was already available,
perhaps in a more basic form, in this encoding.
So the idea that Semitists who are famous worldwide
are going to be ignored again doesn't sit well with
anyone.---Elaine Keown
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