Hebrew dagesh ḥazaq proposal draft

bdenckla

Following up on this discussion, I will soon send this proposal for dagesh ḥazaq to the UTC's SEWG (the Unicode Technical Committee's Script Encoding Working Group).

(I am noting this here in a new discussion because I caused that original discussion to become long and off-topic, though (to me) very interesting!)

John Hudson

I look forward to the encoding of the HEAVY DAGESH. 

bdenckla

Actually, if we must have HEAVY SHEVA, then HEAVY DAGESH would at least have a kind of symmetry to it!

Peter Constable

The distinction doesn't appear to be made in the typesetting of the 2001 edition of BHS or in the Tanakh edition I have (n.d.) from BFBS.

In my English translation of Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, by Israel Yeivin, there are several pages discussing dagesh, but no mention of "dagesh hazaq" by that name, though the last section does mention "strong" dagesh (indicating a "doubling of the consonant"). In section 403, he does mention "dehiq" / "ate merahiq"; I don't know how that compares to the use cases you discuss.

All the same, your draft does show contrastive text elements in publications from independent publishers, which is most valuable. Unicode will not encode different characters based solely on different functions, but when a distinct function is systematically reflected in text with a visually contrastive text element, then there is a case for encoding a distinct character.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky

The problem in Yeivin’s book was not the term, but rather in the translation by E.J. Revell. The Unicode committee should be made aware that, unlike the regular dagesh, there is no need for a set of precombined glyphs with dagesh hazak. (In truth, most of the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Block was never necessary.)

Scott-Martin Kosofsky

The BFBS Hebrew Bible was published in 1883 from material typeset in Vienna some decades earlier. (Electros from that setting were used in many publications well into the 20th century.) It is no longer considered a reliable source. The BHS diacritics were limited by fonts made in the early digital era for setting on LaTeX systems.

John Hudson

Peter, my understanding is that the dagesh hazaq as a visually distinct sign represents the ‘strong dagesh’ as the term is translated in the English edition of Yeivin. It is a kind of reading aid, like other typographic innovations that distinguish different pronunciations of historically ambivalent signs in Hebrew.

I would say the most important thing re. Unicode is to ensure that such optional disunifications are done in a way that preserves the historical common character’s ambivalence as well as its form, which is the case with Ben’s proposal. [I stress retention of the form of the existing character, to avoid the problems that resulted from the disunification of YERAH BEN YOMO and ATNAH HAFUKH.]

bdenckla

John Hudson said:

I look forward to the encoding of the HEAVY DAGESH. 

@John Hudson I think you were (mostly) joking, but I strongly suspect that, as with Mosesson's sheva na proposal, my dagesh ḥazaq proposal will suffer the same (hopefully temporary) renaming.

bdenckla

My dagesh ḥazaq proposal now appears in the Unicode Document Register as L2/25-175.

bdenckla

Based on my dagesh ḥazaq proposal, L2/25-175, the Unicode SEWG (Script Encoding Working Group) has, in L2/25-187, recommended that the UTC (Unicode Technical Committe) provisionally assign one code point U+05C9 HEBREW POINT HEAVY DAGESH.

Although I don't like the name "Heavy Dagesh," I think this is an important addition to the Hebrew block.

Peter Constable

You can see in the Unicode Pipeline page that the character was provisionally assigned to U+05C9 at last week's UTC meeting.