Unicode Hebrew and Greek

There has been some discussion of Unicode Hebrew in comments on Wayne's posting Who hates divorce? Unicode Hebrew and Greek certainly cause problems in e-mail, because not all e-mail programs recognise Unicode, although it has been the international standard on the Internet for many years (Eudora is a particular culprit here). It seems to me that there is much less of a problem using Unicode in web-based programs like Blogger - as long as the program supports Unicode properly, and it seems that Blogger does.

But this does require that those reading the blog are using browsers which support Unicode Hebrew and Greek. This should not be a serious problem for most readers, for Microsoft Internet Explorer (5 or 6, on Windows 95 and later) and Mozilla Firefox (my recommendation, a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris) offer full support for display of Unicode Hebrew and Greek. However, some people may be reading this blog with systems and browsers which do not support Unicode.

Users also need appropriate fonts, and this is where there may be a problem. The default fonts for this blog do not support Hebrew or Greek. My system (Firefox on Windows XP) substitutes them with fonts which do support these scripts, but not always in an ideal way. It seems to use Arial for Hebrew consonants and vowels, but not accents, and for monotonic Greek letters as used in modern Greek. But it uses a different substitute font for Hebrew accents and for polytonic Greek letters i.e. anything with a breathing mark, an iota suffix, a diaeresis, or a grave or circumflex accent. So I see a mixture of fonts, which is rather ugly, and also rather small for Hebrew, but readable. But other systems may not substitute so well.

I note that of the fonts on Windows XP, Tahoma offers full support for polytonic Greek. It may be worth modifying the template for this blog so that this is the first suggested substitute font. Tahoma also supports unaccented Hebrew, but for good quality accented Hebrew either SBL Hebrew or Ezra SIL is needed - and although these are free downloads (and should work well in all applications, not only in Office 2003, in a fully updated Windows XP) they will not be on most readers' systems.

For test purposes, here are some Unicode Hebrew and Greek texts:

Fully pointed and accented Hebrew (thank you, Tim):

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ

Enlargement insertion by Wayne: We should be able to display these Hebrew characters so they are larger:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ

Increasing display size can be done in word processing programs, as well as in blog posts (for Blogger and Blogspot, use the Compose mode when creating or editing posts to view the Font and font size buttons).

Hebrew pointed but not accented:

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

Consonantal Hebrew only:

בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ

Fully accented polytonic Greek (fully composed, according to Internet recommendations):

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

Unaccented Greek:

Εν αρχη ην ο λογος, και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον, και θεος ην ο λογος.

I would be very interested to hear, in comments on this, from anyone who has serious problems reading any of these texts.

UPDATE: In the first comment to this post, Tyler Williams points us to the Greek Unicode Tables on Brandon Wason's Novum Testamentum blog. And Brandon's post points us toward Rod Decker's helpful webpage on Hebrew and Greek Unicode fonts.

Categories: Greek, Hebrew, Unicode, fonts