Peter Kirk wrote:
I am not actually asking for variation selectors with combining marks because I realise that the UTC has already made a decision and is unlikely to reverse it. But I am asking for some flexibility on some of the principles, of the kind which has been demonstrated with umlaut and trÃma, and also in the Indic scripts proposal under review, in order to find an acceptable solution to a real problem. That flexibility might include allowing either <VAV, variation selector, HOLAM> or <VAV, ZWJ, HOLAM> to represent Holam Male although technically the VAV glyph does not (usually) change (nor does the HOLAM glyph) and the HOLAM dot does not ligate with the it, just moves relative to it.
I had a look at Peter Kirk's proposal
http://www.qaya.org/academic/hebrew/Holam2.html
about the Holam Male vs. Vav Haluma problem, and I find it hard to
understand why such complicated treatment should be preferred to simply mirroring the semantic structure of Hebrew writing. Let me quote from
the proposal:
"The Hebrew point HOLAM combines in two different ways with the Hebrew letter VAV. In the first combination, known as Holam Male, the VAV is not pronounced as a consonant, and HOLAM and VAV together serve as the vowel associated with the preceding consonant. In the second combination, known as Vav Haluma, the HOLAM is the vowel of a consonantal VAV."
This clearly implies that the underlying logical order of the characters is different in the two cases, viz.
Holam Male means: Previous Consonant+Holam+Vav(+whatever follows) Vav Haluma means: (whatever's preceding+)Vav+Holam
In other words, in the case of Holam Male, the Holam semantically combines not with the Vav, but with the consonant preceding the Vav. Now, is there any rule in Unicode that would require the sequences
Holam+Vav and Vav+Holam
to be treated as canonical equivalents? If there isn't, then it would actually be a disservice to Hebrew users if the Unicode Consortorium standardized on an encoding (like <ZWJ, VAV, HOLAM>, mentioned in the proposal) that contradicts the underlying semantics, and thereby making the straightforward solution deprecated. If any explicit official recommendation is necessary at all, it should definitely be in favour of the Holam+Vav vs. Vav+Holam scheme, once it's technically possible.
In one of his mailings, Peter Kirk also mentions the "false Holam Male", occurring in God's name. I presume that an attempt to distinuish this particular case from instances of "true Holam Male" may have been one of his concerns when preparing the proposal. But if it indeed was the case, then the special treatment should be proposed for the the special case (the "false" one), rather than for instances of standard usage, paralleling the behaviour of other vowel points in a similar situation. And anyway, in the Tetragrammaton (God's name), the Vav following the Holam has a vowel point of its own (a Qamats), which would be impossible, had it been a "mother of reading", as after a "true Holam Male". This is something visible for the computer, too, so if someone wants to e.g. display such instances of the Holam differently from other instances of Holam Male, he can simply use this circumstance for identifying the relevant places programmatically.
Regards,
bushmanush
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