Is there a better way to encode cantillation hierarchy in OSIS?

In theory, cantillation marks and vowel accents in Biblical Hebrew ought to be the sole domain of Unicode Normalisation rather than something to be implemented in XML.

The issue was that "Unicode Normalisation breaks Biblical Hebrew", as Peter Kirk described in detail in the SBL Hebrew Font Manual.

There just might be a better way to do that now, at least according to the Unicode Consortium. I have just started looking into this, though, and I may not understand this correctly.

According to this FAQ, a former problem was fixed:

Q: But isn't there is still a problem with Biblical Hebrew?

A: There was a problem, but it has been addressed. Because the Hebrew points are defined to have distinct combining classes, their character semantics is such that their ordering is immaterial in the standard. To handle those cases where visual ordering is material, see the discussion of the Combining Grapheme Joiner (CGJ) in Section 23.2, Layout Controls, in the Unicode Standard.

It looks like they are using CGJs for this purpose at Tanch.us. According to their Change Log:

Combining Grapheme Joiners (CGJs) have been added in 728 instances to make leading meteg-then-vowel displays more reliable. Ben Denckla suggested this change. The Coding page has been substantially updated.

I can use ugrep to confirm that these characters are there in the text from Tanach.us:

% ugrep '[\x{034F}]' *
Daniel.xml:        <w>יְרוּשָׁלַ֖͏ִם</w>
Daniel.xml:        <w>קֽ͏ָדָמַ֖י</w>
Daniel.xml:        <q>עֽ͏ָלִּ֔ין</q>
Daniel.xml:        <w>וֽ͏ַאֲחַשְׁדַּרְפְּנַיָּא֙</w>
Daniel.xml:        <w>קֽ͏ָדָמַ֔יהּ</w>
Daniel.xml:        <w>קֽ͏ָדָמ֣וֹהִי</w>
Daniel.xml:        <w>עֽ͏ַד־</w>
Daniel.xml:        <w>וְנֽ͏ֶחֱלֵ֙יתִי֙</w>
!!! SNIP !!!

If you take one of those strings and put it into Tim Whitlock's Unicode inspector, you can confirm that it is there, e.g.

יְרוּשָׁלַ֖͏ִם

But the CGJs are not present in OSHB files.

One way of checking this would be to use the output of ugrep and doing searches on the corresponding Tanach.us webpages, e.g. to compare the instances from Daniel to this representation of it, checking to see if the cantillation displays correctly:

Daniel (Tanach.us)

I have not yet done this, it's on my to-do list.

But does anyone have a list of issues with cantillation that are not correctly handled by this? Or does anyone have time to take a good look at whether this fixed the problem?

What are the n attribute values for ? #46

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