> Colin, I think the problems are being beaten one by one.
>
> You point out that Unicode has glyphs for dots under characters,
> but you also point out the that not all fonts contain those glyphs.
> This is a big problem.
> The ones we need in particular are h. (1E25), s. (1E63) and t. (1E6D)
> Cardo (an academic font) has these, but Times New Roman and Arial don't.
> I think the only standard Windows font containing them is Tahoma,
> so if you try to use them, Windows will (hopefully) change the font to
> Tahoma,
> but only for those letters, so they look odd in the word.
> I don't expect that many PDAs and phones will have a full-set Unicode font.
> We could supply one, of course - eg Cardo.
Ah, hadn't thought of that. I read stuff in a unicode font by default so
forgot it was an issue.
> You have two suggestions for shewa:
> If not, I guess we can live with a raised e, (esp as people don't have
> to type it in)
> and then have e for segol.
If we can do raised "e" then that's ideal - both standard and means
people will be more likely to pronounce it correctly and not as "e".
> I like the idea of o for both holem-vav and holem, if we use something
> else to indicate the presence of vav.
> That leaves ô for qames hatuph
Or just swap them round to match everyone else, of course! (We can still
small-cap the o with the circumflex.)
> I'm turning against the idea of /s /for tsade. It really doesn't sound
> like an s. I'd much prefer /tz
> /If so, so you think we could get away with _s_ for /sin/? The problem
> I'm thinking of is words starting with sin,
> which look rather strange with ss - eg 'hate' = /ssânê/^)
> Ug, I guess it will have to do.
Agreed it's not pretty, but unless we can think of something else. And
unfortunately there are words beginning with samekh too. Definitely
going for a two-letter form of tsade is better. Is "ts" or "tz" closer
to the correct prounciation?
> I'm not sure about the dieresis for non-dipthongs. But I noticed that
> one system uses "y",
> eg /hamayim
I've just realised I'm now seriously confused what case we're talking
about. In both hamayim and Cayin, isn't yod a consonant, so we'd
transcribe it as I just have? Or am I being dense.(Compare your
hashâmayim on the example page.) The only "aim" non-dipthong I can think
of is in the word for Jerusalem.
> /As you point out, the problem only occurs with "aim" as in Amora'im
> (and "ain" as in the name Ca'in)
> because when it is a furtive patach the combination isn't a normal
> diphthong pair (eg No'ah)
It is in English though. It could easily be read to match with "coach".
(e plus furtive patah is potentially worse - it does occur in modern
Hebrew but I don't know of one in the Bible.)
> Your point about copy and paste is really important. As you say, <u>
> won't copy and paste.
>
> I had a possible brainwave - what about small caps?
> They look OK when they are written,
> and are preserved with copy-and-paste.
> You can't always easily distinguish a small-cap vowel from the lower
> case letter
> (esp with o and u) but this doesn't matter much,
> because we aren't making distinctions about pronunciation.
> But small cap T and H look different from t and h.
> Also, we can use ")" and "(" as reduced-size superscript for aleph and
> ayin.
> These too will copy and paste in the same way someone might type them.
> Superscript "e" for shewa works OK too.
A brainwave indeed! Looks excellent. And definitely two spaces is
better. T and H nice and clear.
The one thing which I'd change is to retain the circumflexes on the
small-caps letters. This retains the long-vowel information, but also
aids readability I think - particularly for the I where if you just have
the stroke it can get confused with surrounding letters - see elohIm in
particular. (This is historically why i got the dot in the first place,
I believe.) I think the U also looks more natural with the hat - at
least in Garamond it comes out slightly smaller than the surrounding
letters, which won't be so distracting with the accent.)
On yihyeh and similar, I'd include the shewa if and only if you're meant
to sound it, which I'm not 100% sure of in this case. As the
transliteration stands, I would interpret it as two syllables "yi - yeh"
on the grounds that had the intent been for me to pronounce it " yi -
huh - yeh" the raised e would have been included.
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