Summary

The Hebrew point HOLAM combines in two different ways with the Hebrew letter VAV. In the first combination, known as Holam Male, the VAV is not pronounced as a consonant, and HOLAM and VAV together serve as the vowel associated with the preceding consonant. In the second combination, known as Vav Haluma, the HOLAM is the vowel of a consonantal VAV. In high quality typography Holam Male is distinguished from Vav Haluma: Holam Male is written with the HOLAM dot above the right side or above the centre of VAV; and Vav Haluma is written with HOLAM above the top left of VAV. The distinction is clear and significant in some texts. But in less high quality typography Holam Male and Vav Haluma are not distinguished, and usually both rendered with the HOLAM dot above the centre of VAV. Holam Male is very common in pointed Hebrew texts; Vav Haluma is less common but not extremely rare.

Unicode does not currently specify how to distinguish between Holam Male, Vav Haluma, and the undifferentiated combination. Several different ways have been used in existing texts, or recommended for use with Unicode Hebrew fonts. To avoid proliferation of ad hoc solutions, it is proposed here that the UTC specify encodings for the three cases.

Five options, with some sub-options, are outlined below. The (tentatively) preferred option is to encode Holam Male, when distinguished from Vav Haluma, as the sequence <VAV, ZWJ, HOLAM>. This option is proposed to the UTC.

Background

There are two ways of indicating vowels in Hebrew script, which may be used either separately or in combination. The ancient system, which does not fully distinguish the vowel sounds, is to insert the Hebrew letters ALEF, HE, VAV and YOD, which can therefore function as vowels as well as consonants. When "silent", i.e. used to indicate vowels, these letters are known mothers of reading (imot qeri'a or ehevi in Hebrew, matres lectionis in Latin). In the early mediaeval period several different systems of pointing were introduced to specify the vowel sounds more precisely. Only one of these systems, the Tiberian system, is in current use, and this is the only one currently encoded in Unicode. This system is normally used for the biblical and other ancient texts (although not for synagogue scrolls, which are unpointed) and for some modern Hebrew texts. Most modern Hebrew is unpointed, but makes good use of mothers of reading.

One of the Tiberian vowel points, U+05B9 HEBREW POINT HOLAM, consists of a dot usually written above the left side of a Hebrew base character. This represents a long O sound pronounced after the base character. When there is no associated mother of reading, this way of writing a long O sound is known as Holam Haser, i.e. Defective Holam. In old manuscripts, the dot is often positioned over the space between the preceding and following base characters, and sometimes above the right side of the following (to the left) base character. In printed texts, the regular position of the dot is above the left side of the preceding base character.

In pointed Hebrew text the same vowel is often represented both by a vowel point and by a mother of reading. The latter has no vowel point of its own, because the vowel is associated with the preceding consonant. The commonest mother of reading for a long O sound is VAV. Therefore the combination of HOLAM with a VAV mother of reading is common in pointed texts. This combination is known as Holam Male (Male is pronounced as two syllables), i.e. Full Holam. The HOLAM dot is logically associated with the preceding base character, the consonant for which it indicates the vowel sound; the VAV is redundant and silent because the vowel is fully indicated by the HOLAM. Originally the dot was positioned above the space between the preceding base character and the VAV, but it has gradually shifted on to the silent VAV. In modern high quality typography the dot is positioned above the VAV, usually above its right edge or its centre.

The difficulty arises because VAV can also be a consonant, and as such can be followed, like every other consonant, by Holam Haser (or by Holam Male, but this causes no special difficulty). Therefore the HOLAM dot can combine in two logically different ways with VAV. The combination of VAV with Holam Haser is known as Vav Haluma, and is pronounced VO (or in some traditions WO). A combination of VAV with HOLAM could be a Holam Male, where the VAV is silent and the letter VAV and the point HOLAM together represent the vowel; or it could be the letter VAV with a Holam Haser, where the VAV is a consonant and the HOLAM point is a vowel. There is no difference in pronunciation between Holam Male and Holam Haser.

In high quality typography, especially of the Hebrew Bible and of other religious texts, a careful distinction is made between Holam Male and Vav Haluma: in Holam Male, the HOLAM dot is positioned above the right side of the VAV, or sometimes centred above the VAV; but in Vav Haluma, Holam Haser is rendered in its normal position above the left side of VAV. This seems to have been the original practice, but because VAV is a rather narrow letter, and because Vav Haluma is rare in modern Hebrew (in which long O is usually written as Holam Male), most modern typographers of general texts make no distinction, rendering both Holam Male and Vav Haluma by VAV with a HOLAM dot usually centred above it.

The distinction between Holam Male and Vav Haluma is an important and semantically significant one, especially for religious texts. The distinction is made in most Hebrew Bible editions, and in some other texts. See the examples in Figures 1, 2 and 3 below, in which Holam Male and Vav Haluma are distinguished in six Hebrew Bible editions and in two other works.

This distinction is not a rare one. Holam Male is very common in the Hebrew Bible, occurring about 34,808 times or in about 13% of all words. Vav Haluma is less common, occurring about 421 times.

Codex Leningradensis (1006-7)	Lisbon Bible (1492)	Rabbinic Bible (1524-5)
Ginsburg/BFBS edition (1908)	Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1976)	Stone edition of Tanach (1996)

Figure 1: Holam Male (marked in red) and Vav Haluma (marked in blue) distinguished in ancient and modern editions of the Hebrew Bible - these words are from Genesis 4:13.
(If the colours are not visible: In each image, the third base character from the right, with the dot above its right side or its centre, is Holam Male; the third base character from the left, with the dot above its left side, is Vav Haluma.)

Figure 2: Holam Male (left, twice, red, from p.529) and Vav Haluma (right, blue, from p.528) contrasted in Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament, vol.1, reprint by Hendrickson, 1996 (Hebrew words quoted in English text).

Figure 3: Holam Male (right Hebrew word, red) and Vav Haluma (left word, blue) contrasted in Langenscheidt's Pocket Hebrew Dictionary, p.243.

Because there is a real need to distinguish between Holam Male and Vav Haluma, but there is no standard way of doing so, various ad hoc solutions have been used by text providers and by font developers. The Hebrew Bible text from Mechon Mamre (at Genesis 4:13, http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/ct/c0104.htm#13) uses <VAV, HOLAM> for Holam Male and <VAV, ZWJ, HOLAM> for Vav Haluma. The "alpha release" text at http://whi.wts.edu/WHI/Members/klowery/eL/leningradCodex-alpha.zip and the text at http://users.ntplx.net/~kimball/Tanach/Genesis.xml use (again at Genesis 4:13) <HOLAM, VAV> (actually <HOLAM, accent, VAV> according to canonical ordering) for Holam Male and <VAV, HOLAM> for Vav Haluma, and this is also the encoding recommended in the documentation for the fonts SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL. There is however a larger body of existing data, including pointed modern Hebrew and some biblical texts (e.g. the one at http://www.anastesontai.com/b-cantilee/en-cant.asp?A=1&listeB=4), in which Holam Male and Vav Haluma are not distinguished but both encoded as <VAV, HOLAM>.

To avoid this inconsistency and potential confusion, we propose that the UTC should specify distinctive encodings for Holam Male and Vav Haluma, for use when these two need to be distinguished. Various options for these distinctive encodings are discussed below. We note that although Option 2 below can technically be chosen without UTC involvement, because it involves only a spelling rule, the other options do require UTC approval as they involve either sequences with ZWJ or ZWNJ or a new character.

Possible Encodings

There are various possible distinctive encodings for Holam Male and Vav Haluma. (Some of these are already summarised in http://qaya.org/academic/hebrew/Issues-Hebrew-Unicode.html, section 2.3 and appendix B.1.) All of these options are based on the assumption that <VAV, HOLAM> will continue to be a valid encoding for both Holam Male and Vav Haluma when there is no need to distinguish them, as commonly in modern Hebrew text. It is desirable that rendering and other processes will fall back to treating these two as identical when no deliberate distinction is being made, e.g. when a font is applied which does not have special features to support Holam Male and Vav Haluma distinctively, or for collation unless a tailoring is applied to distinguish the two.

In the first three options (and in Option 4a) the recommended encoding for Vav Haluma is simply <VAV, HOLAM>. Although Vav Haluma is less common than Holam Male, this corresponds to the regular use of HOLAM with other Hebrew consonants; this is the reason for using the specially marked encoding for more common case.

Following this list of options and a summary of their advantages and disadvantages, we give our own preferred encoding, and our proposal to the UTC.

1. Holam Male as <VAV, ZWJ, HOLAM>

This first option effectively takes Holam Male as a variant of <VAV, HOLAM> with "a more connected rendering" (to quote from The Unicode Standard, version 4.0, section 15.3, p.390). This "more connected rendering" is indicated by inserting U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ) between VAV and HOLAM. This option was earlier rejected because ZWJ and ZWNJ were not permitted between a base character and a combining character. But this restriction was partially relaxed at the February 2004 UTC meeting. This option depends on a small further relaxation of this restriction.

This encoding has the advantage that the fallback behaviour should be automatically as required. One disadvantage is that as a layout control character ZWJ is intended for making rendering distinctions which have no other semantic significance. However, there are already several defined uses of ZWJ and ZWNJ with Arabic and Indic scripts which do have other semantic significance. There are similar objections to any possible variant of this option using Variation Selectors.

There are no known existing implementations of this option. However, it would be simple to support in fonts.

Another disadvantage of this is that each Holam Male consists of three Unicode characters, including ZWJ which takes three bytes in UTF-8. This increases the size of the encoded Hebrew Bible, relative to solution 2, by 34,000 characters and more than 100,000 UTF-8 bytes, i.e. around 2% of its total length.

2. Holam Male as <HOLAM, VAV>

In this option Holam Male is distinguished from Vav Haluma in that HOLAM is encoded before VAV. This appears to be a breach of the Unicode rule that combining characters must follow their associated base characters. But it is not really a breach of the rule, because the HOLAM in Holam Male is really logically associated with the preceding base character, for which it is the associated vowel, and the VAV is a separate silent letter. Holam Male is analogous to Hiriq Male, i.e. HIRIQ followed by silent YOD, in which the HIRIQ is written below the preceding base character; also to the sequence of HOLAM with silent ALEF, which is encoded unambiguously in this order although the HOLAM is often rendered above the top right side of the ALEF.

With this encoding, the HOLAM is for Unicode purposes linked with the preceding base character in a combining character sequence. The HOLAM will often become separated from the VAV by an accent character, because within a combining character sequence accents are sorted after vowel points in canonical ordering and also in the specific orderings recommended for certain fonts.

The fallback behaviour of this encoding, with a font which has not been set up to work with it, is not ideal but still legible: the Holam Male will be broken up, with the HOLAM being rendered above the left side of the preceding base character.

Some existing texts use this encoding, and it is supported in fonts such as SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL, with Microsoft Windows only. However, this implementation proved to very complex, and may be beyond the capabilities of other rendering systems. This is because of the rule by which HOLAM is not shifted on to a following VAV if the VAV is followed by a vowel, except in the divine name. This rule is complex and not entirely orthographically conditioned, and it has proved necessary to introduce new sequences with ZWJ and ZWNJ to cover marginal cases.

3. Holam Male as a new character

In some ways the simplest option is to define a new Unicode character HEBREW LETTER HOLAM MALE, which might have a compatibility decomposition to <VAV, HOLAM>. This would certainly be simple to implement, and would reduce the size of the encoded text. But it would have no suitable fallback behaviour with fonts which do not support this new character. This solution also loses the essential identity of the HOLAM and the VAV in Holam Male with HOLAM and VAV in other contexts.

4. Two distinct HOLAM combining characters

This option is to define a new second combining character for a variant of HOLAM. Thus one of the variants of HOLAM can be used for the dot in Holam Male, and the other variant can be used in Vav Haluma. There are three sub-options here:

1. Define a new combining character HEBREW POINT RIGHT HOLAM, and use it only in combination with VAV to form Holam Male. Use the existing HOLAM character only for Holam Haser, when combined with any Hebrew consonant.
   

2. Define a new combining character HEBREW POINT HOLAM HASER, and use this for Holam Haser when combined with any Hebrew consonant. Use the existing HOLAM character only in combination with VAV to form Holam Male.

3. Define a new combining character HEBREW POINT LEFT HOLAM, and use it only in combination with VAV to form Vav Haluma. Use the existing HOLAM character in combination with VAV to form Holam Male, and for Holam Haser in combination with consonants other than VAV.
   

These options are reasonably simple to implement. They have the small advantage over Option 3 that the identity of VAV, though not of HOLAM, is preserved. In Option 4a the fallback behaviour is good for Holam Haser but not for Holam Male. In Option 4b the fallback behaviour is good for Holam Male but not for Holam Haser; this may be preferable because Holam Male is commoner than Holam Haser in modern Hebrew. In Option 4c the fallback behaviour is good except for the relatively rare Vav Haluma, i.e. Holam Haser with VAV; but it introduces an entirely illogical distinction between Holam Haser with VAV and Holam Haser with other consonants, which is justified neither by character semantics nor by typography.

5. Vav Haluma as <VAV, ZWNJ, HOLAM> or <VAV, ZWJ, HOLAM>

This option differs from most of the previous ones in that the simple sequence <VAV, HOLAM> is used for Holam Male, rather than for Vav Haluma. This has the advantage that the longer and more complex sequence is used for the less common Vav Haluma, but the disadvantage that consonantal VAV is treated differently from all other Hebrew consonants in how it combines with Holam Haser. The fallback behaviour of this option should be as required.

These sequences were rejected earlier for the same theoretical reasons as option 1, but for the same reasons they can now be considered acceptable.

Theoretically, it is preferable to use U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER (ZWNJ) in this sequence, because Vav Haluma is a less connected rendering than Holam Male. But the encoding with ZWJ is the one already used by Mechon Mamre. This encoding is apparently supported by existing some fonts and rendering engines, but this support may be largely accidental, because the ZWJ unintentionally breaks a rule to position HOLAM centrally over VAV. The long term encoding of text should not be determined in this way by unintended features of current implementations.

Summary of Advantages and Disadvantages

(Tentative) Preferred Encoding

Assuming that the objections to sequences with ZWJ or ZWNJ between base characters and combining characters no longer apply, all of the options above can be considered. Theoretically the neatest of these is Option 1. It is also easy to implement in practice. The only significant objection to it is the increase in the length of the text. But that objection should not be given too much weight, given that storage is cheap and compression can be used for transmission.

Therefore our (tentative) preferred option is Option 1. We propose that Holam Male should be encoded, when it needs to be distinguished from Vav Haluma, as the sequence <VAV, ZWJ, HOLAM>; and that the sequence <VAV, HOLAM> should be used always for Vav Haluma, and for Holam Male when not distinguished from Vav Haluma. Furthermore, because this option involves a sequence with ZWJ, and also because it is desirable that the encoding be clearly standardised, we propose that the UTC specify this as the correct encoding for Holam Male when distinguished from Vav Haluma, and that this specification should be added to Section 8.1 of The Unicode Standard, perhaps after the existing subsection Shin and Sin.