[Comments-hebrew-lgr-20feb19] Public comment to the Proposal for Hebrew Script Root Zone Label Generation Rules

[Meikal Mumin]

Dear colleagues,

as individual member of Latin GP and TF-AIDN, I would like to submit the following comments in response to the request for comments regarding the Hebrew Script Root Zone Label Generation Rules:

1) Section 3.2
„Today, most of the Jewish languages are nearly extinct, and out of dozens of languages only Yiddish and Ladino are defined with EGIDS Scale 4. Since Ladino is written today mainly in Latin script and is not the first language of its 137,000 users, we will not consider it here. Yiddish has 514,160 users worldwide, and is at status 4 for 55% of the users (Israel: 275k, Belarus: 7k); status 5 for 33% of the users (US: 156k, Canada: 13.6k, Moldova: 1.3k); status 7-9 for users in other countries.“

Obviously, Yiddish was considered as it is being discussed in several sections of the proposal. The wording here however seems to suggest otherwise. It may be useful to adapt the wording to clarify that Yiddish was in fact considered and to generally provide further information on the language, such as e.g. the stability of the written representation, the orthographic means and repertoire of letters and representation in MSR-4, deviations from the use of the script vis-à-vis Hebrew, as well as sources considered and the GP’s expertise in regard towards representation of minority languages.

2) Section 5.1.5 gives the following as rationale for the exclusion of U+05F0, U+05F1, U+05F2:

„The first three might be confused with their respective combinations of two single letters. In addition, they can be adequately replaced by their respective combination of two consecutive single letters – DOUBLE YOD by two consecutive YOD, etc.“

At first glance, the rationale given seems to suggest rather an in-script variant relationship between those three sets of codepoints, rather than exclusion from the repertoire. Given their exclusive use in a minority language, it may be advisable to provide a more substantial rationale, to ensure that the right to representation of linguistic minorities was considered and weighed appropriately against other considerations such as the safety and stability of the root zone.

3) Section 6 Variants discusses in-script variants only. Some evidence available publicly on the Internet (cf. http://www.oketz.com/cursive/, or https://omniglot.com/writing/hebrew.htm, for example) seems to suggest that the cursive style of writing Hebrew also occurs in print. The cursive style seems to be stable enough for it to be automatically convertible to the block style (e.g. https://stevemorse.org/hebrew/printcurs.html) and fonts are available which may represent this alternate set of glyphs (http://www.oketz.com/fonts/script.html).

If such alternate glyphs would be encoded by the same code points, there may potentially be some degree of visual similarity to other scripts, which may warrant some cross-script variants. It would be interesting in this context to know if and how the GP judges the use of the Modern Cursive Hebrew script and other styles of writing Hebrew and if any cross-script variants could be warranted from a point of view of the Hebrew GP. Otherwise it would be useful to clarify that the proposal does not suggest any cross-script variants.

Kind regards,

Meikal Mumin
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