> Colin, I think I had a couple of vowels wrong in the first line of the
> top table
> of TransliterationScheme.doc in the Dropbox. I've corrected them in red.
> Are there others which were wrong? Please mark them with a highlight or
> something.
I'll have a check through. (This kind of thing is a complete nightmare
to get exactly right!)
> One thing I'm a little unhappy with (but I think it is ignorable) is
> that qames-hatuph is ô.
> I don't really know about this, because it is supposed to be shorter
> than qames,
> but does that mean it is a short "o" sound, or is it a relatively long
> "o" sound which is shorter than â ?
> But I'm not too bothered about exactly what it sounds like, partly
> because prob no-one knows,
> and partly because it is so much neater to use ô because
> * the similarity of ô and â help to make the link with their identical
> hebrew
> * if we used "o" it would be indistinguishable from holem without vav.
> * I don't want to use a different accent.
(My last word on this - promise!)
We currently have:
* qames-hatuph: ô
* holam: o
* waw-holam: Ô (but in small-caps so hard to distinguish from ô)
I would prefer to swap the first two, so:
* qames-hatuph: o
* holam: ô
* waw-holam: Ô
because:
* qames-hatuph is the grammatically short vowel and holam the
grammatically long vowel
* everybody else who distinguishes them does it that way round
* given that waw-holam is going to be confused with one or the other, it
makes sense to have it confused with the one it's to some extent
interchangeable with anyway.
These for me easily outweigh wanting to retain the link to how it's
rendered in Hebrew (which as I've said on other matters will in general
be of indifference to the user who knows no Hebrew, but so well-known as
to not need reminding of to anyone who knows even the rudiments of the
language.)
> On decisions whether a shewa is transliterated or not,
> I'm depending on Matthew Anstey's Transliterated OT in BibleWorks
> (called BHS but actually based on Michigan-Claremont-Westminster
> corrected Leningrad text)
> which I'll also rely on for distinguishing between qames and qames-hatuph
Good. I wasn't aware there was an "official" source for this. Very helpful.
Colin
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