Hebrew sheva na provisionally assigned to U+05C8 ("Heavy Sheva")

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bdenckla
bdenckla Posts: 22
edited May 17 in Font Technology
Following up on this discussion, note that, as documented in this section of the Unicode Pipeline, on 2025-Jan-22 the code point U+05C8 was provisionally assigned to the name HEBREW POINT HEAVY SHEVA, as a result of proposal L2/24-274.

(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!)

Overall, this is great news. The only drawback is that in my opinion, "HEAVY SHEVA" is not a good name. I have submitted a document to the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) suggesting that the name be reverted to what was original proposed: SHEVA NA.
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  • Scott-Martin Kosofsky
    Scott-Martin Kosofsky Posts: 430
    Great news, indeed! Thanks for your efforts, Ben.
  • bdenckla
    bdenckla Posts: 22
    Small update: my document re-suggesting the name SHEVA NA now appears in the UTC document register as L2/25-160. Perhaps it will be discussed at the July UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) meeting.
  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 815
    It is going to be discussed in ISO WG2’s annual meeting this week, in the current version of the agenda it is listed as Proposal to encode Hebrew Point Sheva Na U+05C.


  • bdenckla
    bdenckla Posts: 22
    Thanks @Andreas Stötzner for this info. I must admit to being a bit fuzzy on the details of the relationship (intimate but not identical) between ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Standard. The two standards seem to differ greatly in their processes but they seem to differ little in their (eventual) contents.

    Regarding process, prompted by your post above I did some casual Googling and found that, at least at that casual level, the process of ISO WG2 seems far less Internet-public than that of the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee). That is all a fancy way of saying I could not find the agenda you refer to.

    BTW I assume you mean U+05C8 above, i.e. I assume a trailing "8" is missing from your post above.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,439
    ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Standard have a synchronised character set, with the Unicode Standard being recognised as the official implementation of ISO/IEC 10646 (the latter is basically just a character encoding set, while Unicode also standardises character properties and specifies how they should be interpreted in software).

    Some characters are still proposed via national standards bodies, but my impression is that the majority of encoding proposals now go through Unicode: first to the Script Encoding Working Group, which may request revisions to proposals or help proposers refine documentation, and then to the Unicode Technical Committee with SEW recommendations. When the character set for a Unicode version release has undergone public review, it is balloted by ISO/IEC 10646 member organisations (national standards bodies). By this point, the balloting should be a formality, since there has been a lengthy period of time for national standards bodies to have engaged in the process — often years, from the initial proposal through to the UTC acceptance and public review —, but there’s recently been an issue with one national standards body objecting to characters included in a ballot.

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