Talk:Holam

My additions

In the last few days i made a lot of changes to this article. I was trying to make it answer the questions - When is holam haser is written? When is the waw written? What are the words in which א or ה mark the /o/ sound?

I answered them mostly according to very conservative and normative sources: Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar and Academy Decisions in Grammar. Any corrections and additions according to other sources are welcome.

My work is not finished. I plan to update the articles about all the other vowel signs in a similar way. I just started with Holam, because it is relatively easy :) --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:55, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your effort. The article is much better now. My remarks:

1. When giving a footnote regarding a citation from the bible, please give the full citation itself or a link to a website it is written in.
2. The Niqud signs are usually written in this article in a font that is too small for persons who are not used to read with no Niqud.

Eddau (talk) 16:03, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Try using Ctrl+Plus or Ctrl+ScrollWheel to magnify the text. You can unmagnify when you finish with the niqqud. —Solo Owl (talk) 03:06, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I second all of Eddau's remarks. May I pick a nit? You wrote "מִצְו‌ֹת - [miˈtswot]". I thought a Hebrew syllable could not begin with two consonants (unless separated by an epenthetic schwa). Regardless, I think this should be [mits'woth] or [mits'vot]. (I was brought up to say "['mits.vos]" with both vowels rather centralized, or in Yinglish, ['mits.vaz].) —Solo Owl (talk) 03:03, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Placement of the dot over aleph

According to Gesenius's grammar and other textbooks, when holam takes aleph as a mater, the dot should be over the right arm of aleph rather than in its usual place at the upper left of the consonant. But the article shows רֹאשׁ‎ with the holam in the usual place. I can't figure out even how to get it to display properly. There doesn't seem to be a separate Unicode character for aleph with a holam over its right arm. Is it just a font rendering issue? Are there fonts smart enough to make it display correctly? They would have to know the difference between aleph used as a mater and aleph used as a consonant (e.g. מְפֹאָר‎), where the dot is in its usual place. —Angr (talk) 01:30, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Ezra SIL SR is as close as it gets to perfection. Its diacritics placement algorithm is clever enough for this matter, although it does have other problems:

• It works flawlessly in browsers on Windows 7, but i saw some issues with it on Macs, Windows XP, GNU/Linux and also in OpenOffice on Windows 7.
• The style of this font is very Biblical - i wouldn't typeset a modern book or website using it, but for religious books it's very good.

Also note that the SR version represents the more common diacritics style; the version without "SR" in the name has some peculiar shapes for the diacritics.

I started writing a page about such issues recently: User:Amire80/Things to check in Hebrew fonts. It's not complete yet, but it may interest you already. Some parts of that page will eventually land in relevant encyclopedic articles.

The issue that you are describing here should be mentioned in the article, too. I'll do it soon. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 09:27, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

The SBL Hebrew font is also good at it, although it has other issues. It is listed first in {{Script/Hebrew}}; i would rather have Ezra SIL SR as the first one, because it's Free as in freedom. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 09:38, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

...And i added the appearance section. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 15:31, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

U+E801 is in the Private Use area

The character U+E801 is in the Private Use area. The section needs correcting. DFH (talk) 09:49, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Done. The correct presentation form character is U+FB4B HEBREW LETTER VAV WITH HOLAM.

Note that in some situations such as the source text for use in Bible software, the use of presentation forms is deprecated. DFH (talk) 10:01, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Font size and visibility

On my Android phone the niqqud dots, in the font size of the article text, are so small they're almost invisible. I'm increasing the font size of the Hebrew words in the text to 125% to make the dots, and the niqqud in general, more visible, both by their being larger and by the additional white space above the line of text. Thnidu (talk) 02:53, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

“מְלֹאת” is not an infinitive

The infinitives of “מ-ל-א” are “לִמְלֺא” and “מָלֹא”.
“מְלֹאת” is a gerund AFAIK. The article either meant “gerund” or is simply wrong. SapphireBrick (talk) 04:01, 20 June 2022 (UTC)