E. Keown wrote:
Elaine Keown in beautiful Vancouver, B.C.
Hi,
I wrote 3 Hebrew diacritics proposals between
May-July.
One of them was incorrectly entered in the WG2 online listing. It needs the title below, which includes the word 'Samaritan.' The WG2 listing completely misidentifies the proposal---the title listed has NO relationship to my actual title.
I am still waiting on the font for these, but I think
part of it might be finished soon.
1.
Proposal to add Samaritan Pointing to the UCS
http://www.lashonkodesh.org/samarpro.pdf
WG2 number: N2748
This is the one I'm going to comment on, since it's the one I know best.
I know that Michael Everson and I are working on a Samaritan proposal, which I think will sum up a lot of the points you have here, better. Things like:
- Vowel names. My Samaritan informant preferred simply SAMARITAN VOWEL A / E / AA / O / U to the traditional Arabic names, on the grounds that the Arabic names aren't native Samaritan names either. But scholars are probably familiar with them, so maybe we should keep the Arabic names and relegate the phonetics to the notes (especially since they are used inconsistently in old texts). But we probably should normalize to other Arabic transliteration: "FATHA AL-IHA" etc. There are one or two other marks noted in Ben-Hayyim's "Grammar of Samaritan Hebrew." Also, there are other Samaritan vowels, more recent proposals (such as O) which are in use by the Samaritan community in teaching materials, and also a few other vowel-like symbols not covered. (mark for indicating hard BA and FI, mark for YUT-like vowel hiatus, etc).
- Accents (te`amim, whatever you call them). The names should probably follow Samaritan pronunciation (AFSAQ, ANGED, etc) and not Tiberian pronunciation based only on the consonants. Also, these are not combining marks, so are not really diacritics. I'm awaiting delivery of a Samaritan teaching Pentateuch which, from what I've heard, uses *another* entire system of cantillation marks to teach proper prosody. It's a relatively recent invention, but if it is in fact unlike punctuation we've seen, and if it is in fact in use, it should be considered.
- Other marks. There are several other Samaritan punctuations on my list, such as an abbreviation mark, etc.
- Letters. We have a list of the letters in Samaritan pronunciation. Despite the paleographical distinction between "majuscule" and "minuscule" forms, I do not believe that these constitute an actual case distinction. There is no evidence of usage along the lines of case distinctions. It's not "you use majuscules with these words or with such and such letters," it's "you use majuscules for formal texts." They're different fonts, not different alphabets. My informant did not object when I observed this.
We should probably also bounce these off some secular Samaritan scholars (again, with the newest versions).
When these items are added, plus a couple more, thenThere's a big and scary document I need to write about symbols for the Tetragrammaton, underpinning my proposal from years ago, and someone's going to have to figure out a good answer. In an old list of proposed characters of yours, Elaine, you also mentioned the PETUHA and SETUMA symbols. Those should probably be discussed; I can see arguments for and against those (mainly against, but not entirely).
we will all be done with diacritics for *Hebrew* in
Unicode. There are more punctuation symbols, more
number symbols, more abbreviation symbols.....
~mark
