Jony Rosenne wrote:
And Dean's example of Cuneiform characters weren't also "very old"? Besides, we still have documents from that "very old" time (only a few centuries ago, hardly old at all. Why, many of them are printed!), documents which *do* use the glyphs ambiguously. If it's sensible to encode ambiguous characters, then these are probably the most sensible cases for it. But it isn't.You did suggest something like this during one of the various Hebrew character debates. But it doesn't hold up well in general. By that logic, we also now need to encode LATIN LETTER U OR V, LATIN LETTER I OR J (both in CAPITAL and SMALL versions), plus LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG OR SHORT S (though we could probably manage to use just U+0073 for that and encode SHORT S separately). But I don't think anyone would want such a confusing state of affairs. Spelling things right is hard enough when there's only *one* choice for each letter!
The example isn't relevant. These disunifications are very old - you could
have added C/G - and the I and U are commonly used for the ambiguous
characters.
"The I and U are commonly used for the ambiguous characters"? Great. The stemmed version of the cantillation is also commonly used for the ambiguous character. Nothing you've said here distinguishes the case of U/V from the one under discussion.
(Actually, the unification of yerah-ben-yomo and atnah hafukh may actually be older than U/V and I/J. Books were printed with U/V and I/J not distinguished for quite a long time, certainly into the 17th century (viz. Shakespeare's First Folio, for a famous example), but the cantillations were conflated in quite early printings of the Bible--though not necessarily the earliest.)
~mark
