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Re: orion 4QMish(c) correction

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Judith wrote:

----------
> >Geg,

Good grief, did I really type "Geg"??? Sorry, Greg.

> >>      A.2.4  . . . YSWD  B'H  $LM(tsade)YWN . . .
> >
> >Just a tiny little FYI: both CCAT and most Hebrew fonts (for Windows at
> >least) transliterate tsade with C.  Hence $LMCYWN.
> >
> >Sir Nitpick, a.k.a.
> >Dave Washburn
> 
> However, most scholarly work in semitic languages uses s-underdot for
> Tsaddi.  Always thus for Arabic letter sad, and increasingly so for Hebrew
> too.  To use a C is counter-intuitive except for Poles and others whose
> language happens to use the C for the TS sound!

Okay, if you can figure out how to do an s-underdot that can be transmitted
through email or used in a standard ASCII encoding scheme such as CCAT,
I'll buy it.  If not, then we have to come up with something else, don't we?

>  Can someone explain why the software people have chosen to use "C" for
> Tsaddi?  A poor choice given the above facts!

Given what facts?  The fact in evidence is that encoding schemes are not
trying to encode sounds, they are trying to encode characters so that
fonts, search programs, etc. can be mapped to them and produce the proper
sequence of characters when called up on to do so.  Like it or not, until
Unicode catches on in non-Unix environments, we're stuck with the limited
set of 127 ASCII characters to encode non-Roman alphabets such as Hebrew
and have them machine-readable across platforms.  Using C for tsade is no
more absurd than using $ for shin, as Greg did above.  The SPTiberian font
available from the Scholars Press website uses this same scheme, as well as
using # for unpointed sin/shin.  It's an encoding pattern designed to allow
us to represent non-Roman characters, nothing more.  Sounds of the actual
non-Roman letters have little or nothing to do with it.  The nice thing is,
if you get the SPTiberian font and install it, then look at the encoded
Hebrew above, it comes out as correct Hebrew.  That's the goal, and the
encoding pattern accomplishes it.
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur/
If you don't know where you're going, don't lead.