Introduction
Here's what the Hebrew letters daleth
and resh look like.
רד
With that in mind, consider the following excerpt about Isaiah 33.8.
The RSV, NRSV, NAB, and NIV follow 1QIsaa in
reading
ʾdym [‘ê·ḏîm] [עֵדִ֔ים]
[concordance]
“witnesses”
instead of the MT
ʾrym [‘ā·rîm] [עָרִ֔ים]
[concordance]
“cities.”
“Witnesses” seems appropriate to the meaning of the
passage, and the interchange of resh
for daleth is understandable in light of the similarity
of the letter shapes. The NJV also calls attention to this
reading in a footnote.
|
|
Harold Scanlin,
The Dead Sea Scrolls & Modern Translations of the Old
Testament,
p. 130
|
This got me thinking, how should one go about writing a sacred
text in a way that avoids such problems?
Or, more generally, how should one go about writing a text that
needs to be transmitted with high fidelity,
i.e. faithfully. Sacred texts are just a specific example of
this. The situation reminds me of an old FedEx slogan:
|
When it Absolutely, Positively has to be there overnight.
|
So, sacred texts are those where it absolutely, positively must
be copied right. Yet, historically, they have fallen far short
of this. At least, this is true of the sacred texts of Judaism,
which are the only ones I know anything about.
The following is a rambling set of comments on the topic of
faithful transmission of text. I'd like to be able to call it
something more profound, like an "extended meditation," but it
is really just a ramble. As the title suggests, it is the first
of what I hope will be a two-part whole.
Avoid homoglyphs
The first rule of faithful transmission is "avoid homoglyphs."
Well, really it should be "avoid homoglyphs and
near-homoglyphs," but that isn't as catchy. Anyway, it is just a
fancy way of saying "use letterforms that look different."
Hebrew homoglyphs
Hebrew is littered with near-homoglyphs. We've already seen the
issue with daleth and resh; here it is again,
along with various other issues.
נג כב עצ זןו רדך סם
A more detailed presentation of these issues is available on
the following web page. (Note that it shows Sofit and Fey Sofit
in their cursive form. Their printed forms are not easily
confused.)
Similar
Hebrew Letters
| DIGRESSION |
By the way, this "Hebrew for Christians" site is an
example of a general pattern:
Some of the best resources for studying the Tanakh are for
studying the Old Testament.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, or just a thing,
neither good nor bad, I will perhaps opine on in another blog
post. But I will remark here that it feels a little strange to
me. But that feeling itself is a little strange, since when I
step back and think about it, it is not surprising that it
should be the case. Our sacred texts our sacred to them,
too. And, while numbers don't tell all, I'll just point out that
there are something like 150 times as many Christians as Jews in
the world.
|
English homoglyphs
Anyway, back to homoglyphs (and near-homoglyphs). To be fair to
Hebrew, English is not immune to this problem. Or, rather, the
Latin alphabet and Arabic digits are not immune to this
problem. For example consider the following characters.
- 1 (the digit one)
- I (the letter capital I as in India) (henceforth "CI")
- l (the letter lowercase el) (henceforth "LL")
Putting all three together, you get "1 I l." How much these
differ depends on whatever font is operative. For some
edification and entertainment, I recommend typing "1 I l" in at
one of the following sites:
flippingtypical.com
wordmark.it
NOTATIONAL
ASIDE |
I chose "India" as an example of a word starting with I
since that's the choice of
the NATO
phonetic alphabet, which is designed to give letters
different-sounding names, solving a problem analogous to the
one we are discussing here.
|
Are homoglyphs "wrong"?
I think we have to let sans serif fonts off easy on the CI/LL
distinction. Though the distinction can be made with full
strokes, not just serifs, I feel that it is not really in the
charter of a sans serif font to have to make distinctions like
that.
More generally, we can't say that any font is wrong if it fails
to make one or more of these distinctions. Fonts serve a variety
of purposes; their design goals span concerns of form, function,
and the great gray area in between. Many of these goals are at
odds with each other, and hence trade-offs must be made. In the
service of one goal, another goal may be sacrificed, or at least
compromised. For example, if simplicity of letterform is allowed
to trump distinctness of letterform, then perhaps one, CI, and
LL would be allowed to be very similar or even the same.
That having been said, for most purposes, distinctness of
letterform is a very important goal for a font. Thus a font
intended for general use should give this goal great weight in
making its design trade-offs.
One and CI
My particular interest is the one/CI distinction. The most
common problem here is a one that looks like CI. The
above sites allowed me to quickly identify the following fonts
on my computer as "offenders" in this area.
| Hoefler Text |
|
| Big Caslon |
|
A Roman-style one (henceforth "R1"), i.e. a one that looks like
CI, is common as part of what are called old-style numerals or
old-style figures (OSF). Such a one may be distinguishable (with
effort) from CI since it is usually only x-height. Even then,
when mixed with a small caps CI, the problem may persist. This
might seem an obscure situation, but the use of small caps for
acronyms is a somewhat common style.
Here's the
story of how Vice President Al Gore caused the one in the
Brioni font to be changed from Roman to Arabic to make it
easily distinguishable from CI.
Roman ones and the Great Isaiah Scroll
Let's get back to the sacred. Strangely enough, my first
experience of one/CI confusion happened while reading about some
famous daleth/resh confusions of more than two thousand
years ago! The very perceptive reader may have noticed
the opportunity for one/CI confusion in the prickly-looking
abbreviation "1QIsa" that appears in my opening quote.
"1QIsa" is an interesting opportunity for confusion. On the
positive side, it has a one and a CI, making slight differences
between the glyphs easier to see than if they appeared
independently and the reader had to find and compare far-flung
examples. Also on the positive side, many readers would know,
from context, that the third glyph is a CI since it begins an
abbreviation for Isaiah. Slightly fewer, but still many readers
would know, from context, that the glyph before the Q is
supposed to represent a number.
But here begins the real problem. When the one resembles a CI,
is the reader to infer that the convention is to use Roman
rather than Arabic numerals? For the trivial case of the number
one, it doesn't really matter, since they represent the same
thing. But for the case of the number eleven, confusion could be
serious, since R1 glyphs would make eleven look like the Roman
numeral representation for two. And, as it turns out, there was
a Cave 11 at Qumran, containing, among other things, the Great
Temple Scroll (11QTa).
Let's see how the Great Isaiah Scroll is referred to in the NJPS
translation of Prophets (Nevi'im) that was first published in
1978 (ISBN 0-8276-0096-8). (This is not the first publication of
its translation of Isaiah; that was in 1973.)
First, we should note that the NJPS Prophets abbreviates Isaiah
to just "Is" as opposed to the more standard "Isa." Perhaps
that standard had not been established yet, and in any case
that's not our issue here.
Our issue here is that its typesetting of "1QIs" visits the
whole gamut of the one/CI/LL confusion. The one is represented
- confusingly, an R1
- incorrectly, as LL
- correctly, as an Arabic one (henceforth "A1")
The CI is represented
- incorrectly, as an LL
- correctly, as a CI
Below are scans of examples of its different settings of
"1QIsa." The page numbers and the representations of
one and CI are listed in the first row. Apologies that these are
bilevel rather than grayscale images.
| 356: R1 / LL |
368: LL / CI |
369: R1 / CI |
468: A1 / CI |
 |
 |
 |
 |
This was all fixed, to A1/CI, in the 1985 NJPS Tanakh. More
generally, the 1985 Tanakh moved to using A1 rather than R1 in
footnotes.
And then came the digital age.
What promise it offered, and continues to offer! Yet, what
typographic barbarisms it has facilitated. I suppose that only
from great heights can great falls happen. Another way I've seen
it well-put is:
|
To err is human; to really screw things up requires a computer.
|
Don't get me wrong, my Kindle version of the NJPS Tanakh is one
of my prized possessions, inasmuch as something so intangible
can be thought of as a possession. But somehow one/CI confusion
in "1QIs" crept back in, with a vengeance. In particular, the
one is usually represented as a CI.
Below are scans of examples of its different settings of
"1QIsa." The Kindle locations, Kindle and printed
page numbers, and the representations of one and CI are listed
in the first row.
| 16293 / 762 / 633: CI / CI |
16330 / 762 / 640: A1 / CI |
|
|
| DIGRESSION |
In typical great heights/great falls fashion, Kindle
locations offer citations of intriguingly high resolution,
but all footnotes have been converted to endnotes, and thus
all Isaiah footnotes appear to be on the last page of
Isaiah, 762. Within the hyper-linked Kindle world, this
doesn't really matter. For citations that "work" for the
printed version, you need to follow the endnote's hyperlink
"backward" to find the real page.
|
In the Kindle edition, how can we know whether the one is being
represented by a CI or an R1? Well, for one thing it is
visually identical to other CI glyphs, but, more deeply, if you
copy and paste it, it is a CI; and if you search for IQI
(CI-Q-CI), you'll find those instances that use it.
An important consequence of this is that if you search for 1QI
(one-Q-CI), you won't find the IQI (CI-Q-CI)
instances. And here we really find form spilling over into
function. So far all my complaints about the typesetting of
"1QIs" could be dismissed as the whinings of an aesthete with
too much time on his hands. I would mostly disagree with this
characterization, but would have to admit that function was only
impaired, not destroyed by these problems. If we narrowly define
function as transmitting the meaning, "Isaiah manuscript from
Cave 1 at Qumran," then these problems probably did not destroy
function for most readers. They probably just made it more
difficult to decode this meaning, i.e. they only impaired
function.
But the digital version adds (or should add) a new function: the
ability to search. And this was not just impaired but destroyed
by the misrepresentation of one as CI.
| DIGRESSION |
When one is represented as one in the Kindle edition, it
shows up as an Arabic, yet old-style, figure. This and other
research leads me to believe that Georgia is the font used
by the Kindle Reader for Mac. Or at least it is the font
used when a serif, proportional font is requested. Note that
you can't easily change fonts on any Kindle-reading
platform. That's why I said it is "the font," not "the
default font." On Kindle hardware, the font seems to be PMN
Caecilia, which has a lining one, i.e. a non-old-style
one. Some fonts may have an option for both lining and
old-style figures, and perhaps even an option for both an
Arabic and Roman old-style figure for 1. I'm not sure if
either of these fonts do, but the relevant question here is
what does their default one look like.
|
Conclusions
If you have the luxury of making up your own alphabet, avoid
homoglyphs. This luxury is rarely available; the only recent
example I can think of is the invention of the Klingon
alphabet. I wonder how distinguishable its glyphs are.
| DIGRESSION |
Another "I wonder ..." about a recent example: did anything
analogous to daleth/resh confusion ever happen with
the Book of Mormon?
|
Back to obvious conclusions: if you, like most of us, are stuck
using someone else's alphabet, choose your fonts so as to avoid
homoglyphs. For example, avoid fonts with Roman ones if the text
you're setting might use them in a way that would cause
confusion. Perhaps you don't need to avoid the font altogether
if it provides an Arabic one as an alternative.
Finally, let's zoom out to a theological question: if Isaiah's
words are holy, why didn't G-d give him a better alphabet to
record them in?
My suggestion is, the Hebrew alphabet is no more the alphabet of
G-d than the Hebrew language is the language of G-d. Indeed
problems like daleth/resh confusion serve a useful
purpose. They remind us that we are reading holy words, not
G-d's words. Holy words bring us closer to G-d, but they are
written in man's imperfect alphabets, and in man's imperfect
languages.
To me, the very notion of "G-d's words" unacceptably diminishes
G-d by seeing him as acting within the limits of language and
therefore possibly constrained by language.
Like anyone else (perhaps more so), I can't claim to know much
about G-d. But I'm pretty sure he is without limits. (So I'm
also pretty sure he is not a "he" or a "she"!) And I'm pretty
sure that if G-d had an alphabet, we surely could not read it.
