Peter Constable wrote:
I was not involved in those discussions so cannot comment on them. I just wish to point out that the MCW representation of Hebrew most certain *is* supported in Unicode: MCW uses ASCII Latin letters and punctuation characters to stand for Hebrew letters, vowel points and accents, and those exact same ASCII characters are encoded in Unicode.
This was an 8-bit hack, the point which Elaine and other Biblical Hebrew scholars make is that MCW explicitly encodes distinctions between some marks, based on positioning, that the Unicode Hebrew block unifies. This means that while MCW text can be easily converted to Unicode Hebrew, it is not possible to round-trip such conversion in the same way that Unicode provides for pre-existing 8-bit standard character sets. One of the unfortunate aspects of this is that the ASCII-hack MCW encoding will likely remain the source encoding for many electronic Biblical Hebrew texts for some time to come, even if published texts are re-encoded as Unicode Hebrew, since MCW permits simple and unambiguous plain-text encoding of distinctions that are important to textual analysis. For example, although my clients at Libronic use Unicode encoding for their electronic BHS edition (because it provides greater interchangeability), they maintain an MCW encoded text as their master source. So much for the 'universal' character set...
John Hudson
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Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
