Biblical variant of 'il' keyboard layout

[Matt Reimer]

On 11/12/06, Drew Parsons <dparsons at debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 05:49 +0100, Sebastian J. Bronner wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > studying theology and using Linux is proving to be a road filled with
> > challenges.  I have created a (complete) variant for the il-layout which
> > includes all characters needed to type Old-Testament Hebrew.  The
> > variant was designed by Tiro (the same people who designed the SBL
> > Hebrew font) and I took that specification and entered it into a symbols
> > file.
>
> Just out of interest (and for something who never managed to get past
> 'gimel'), what are the differences between this layout and a modern
> Hebrew il layout?

The short answer: modern Hebrew doesn't use vowel marks.

The long answer: as spoken Hebrew declined in the medieval period,
scribes began adding vowel marks around the consonants of the Hebrew
Bible to preserve the pronunciation and meaning. See the section
"Medieval Hebrew" on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew.

Matt