User:Erutuon/Hebrew accent

We have not had an agreed-on accent (stress) mark for Hebrew, which stymies efforts to transliterate Hebrew properly. I've noticed two options mentioned.

Accent is commonly marked in scholarly Biblical Hebrew textbooks and footnotes in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and such places with ole. In such systems the meteg is often used (not consistent with its uses in the text of the Bible) to mark אָ when it is to be interpreted as long ā rather than short o.

According to a comment by User:Wikitiki89 in Module talk:he-translit, the meteg is commonly used to mark accent, and is more familiar to and commonly used by people actively using Hebrew today, as in ArtScroll's Interlinear Tehillim (Psalms). I'm not familiar with this usage, but I wonder what percentage of readers or editors might be confused to see the meteg used to mark unaccented long ā.

Whichever of these two accent marks is chosen, meteg apparently needs to be used. Meteg may not display well for most people when it is combined with vowel diacritics, if the person's operating system doesn't have fonts installed by default that support it. For instance, probably looks fine for most people, but   may display with the meteg on top of the vowel diacritic, which may make כֶּֽ look like it has a qamats. The font DejaVu Sans displays the segol-meteg like this; here it is if you have the font installed: כֶּֽתֶר. (Strangely DejaVu Sans used to be on the list of fonts for Hebrew in MediaWiki:Common.css.) On my computer two of the default fonts (Arial and Times New Roman) display it reasonably well.

To fix the display of meteg combined with a vowel diacritic, we could ask the Wikimedia developers to install an extension, UniversalLanguageSelector, that's used on English Wikisource to load webfonts for languages that often lack font support (for instance, s:Template:Lang-akk loads an Akkadian webfont). This extension does not work on mobile devices, according to s:Template:Lang/doc, and quite a few people are browsing on phones and would be out of luck if their phone doesn't have a meteg-compatible font installed.