The Hebrew Extended (Proposed) Block

[Mark E. Shoulson]

Sounds like a plan; most additional Hebrew characters can probably 
safely live in the SMP, as they are not all that common (except, of 
course, TETRAGRAMMATON, which I'll be writing another proposal about).

What Samaritan vowel and accent points did we miss when we did Samaritan 
the first time around?  We tried to be pretty comprehensive with it, 
including contact with the user community and inspecting books and MSS.

Somewhere I have a list of signs I started making by reading an entry in 
an encyclopedia (Encyclopedia Judaica?) s.v. "Masorah". Ah, found it.  
Various lines, strokes, dots, colons, pairs of dots in assorted 
configurations around letters (Palestinian and Babylonian vowel points, 
etc)...  A bunch of combining letters (COMBINING SAMEKH ABOVE, etc), 
some not exactly normal (SLANTED NUN ABOVE)... I think I had about 
sixty.  But it isn't particularly well-organized or researched.

There is also the "Expanded" Tiberian cantillation system I have seen 
mentioned (in Yeivin's book on Masorah for example, in the part on 
accents, para. #220).  It seems to distinguish things like different 
flavors of MUNAH; I have never really found much about it, so I don't 
know if it needs special graphemes.  The only examples in the Yeivin 
book that I see appear to use existing symbols in combinations (e.g. 
MUNAH plus a MERKHA KEFULA for a "mekarbel").

What other Hebrew characters have you got in mind?  Could be 
interesting.  Are you considering symbols for PETUHA and SETUMA 
pericopes in your "typesetting" section?  Are those fit to be encoded?  
I think they've been mentioned before, but it's hard to show that they 
are anything other than specialized uses of PEH and SAMEKH (unless we're 
talking about using them as formatters, and then they're pretty 
definitely out of scope).

~mark

On 05/10/2016 07:55 PM, Robert Wheelock wrote:
> Hello again, y’all!
>
> ¡BAD NEWS! (CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT):  The Unicode Consortium has assigned 
> OTHER characters into the U+00860-U+008FF areas in the BMP of 
> Unicode—Malayalam extended additional characters for Garshuni, and 
> more additional Arabic characters.
>
> We’ll need to find a DIFFERENT subblock to plant down our Hebrew 
> extended characters...  either somewhere ELSE within the BMP, 
> _or_ somewhere within either SMP areas 1 or 2.
> It’ll be the same arrangement originally planned for the U+00860 
> area—but relocated and expanded upon!
>
> ·Additional characters for correct typesetting of Hebrew
> ·Hebrew Palestinian vowel and pronunciation points
> ·The small superscript signs /śin/ and /shin/ for the letter /shin/
> ·Hebrew Palestinian cantillation
> ·Hebrew Babylonian vowel and pronunciation points
> ·Hebrew Babylonian cantillation
> ·Hebrew Samaritan vowel and pronunciation points
> ·Additional Hebrew characters for other Jewish languages
> A new TXT listing of this subblock (with the new CORRECT location) 
> will be forthcoming. STAY TUNED!
>
>

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