L2/03-455 Date/Time: Mon Dec 22 07:27:08 EST 2003 Contact: peterkirk@qaya.org Report Type: Error Report The Roadmap to the BMP (http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp/) needs a correction. The current situation is confusing to scholars of Aramaic and other ancient Semitic languages. Aramaic is listed as one of the "scripts for which proposals have been formally submitted to the UTC or to WG2. There is generally a link to the formal proposal." But the formal proposal to which it is linked, http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2042.pdf, is not for the generic Aramaic alphabet described in http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2311.pdf, but for the Palmyrene style or script which is listed as a separate script in N2311 and is roadmapped in the SMP. There is no formal proposal for the generic Aramaic alphabet, and so the status of Aramaic in the roadmap should be changed to "scripts for which detailed proposals have not yet been written", and the link to N2042 removed. N2042 might be listed instead as a proposal for Palmyrene. The situation is highly confusing to scholars of Aramaic because there is no clear definition of what script is intended to be the roadmapped Aramaic. The voluminous literature in classical and modern Aramaic is regularly printed either in the Hebrew script, which is known to scholars as the Aramaic square script, or in the Syriac script; most of it was originally written in one of these scripts. Other scripts are used by small communities or for special purposes, but these are either already in Unicode (Latin, Cyrillic etc) or separately roadmapped (Samaritan, Mandaic etc). Otherwise there is only a very small corpus of inscriptional, papyrus etc material, mostly written with the same alphabet as the Aramaic square script but with a variety of glyph styles and shapes. When not working with facsimiles, scholars regularly transcribe these texts into unpointed Aramaic square script, i.e. unpointed Hebrew script. (See for example "The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri", edited by E.G. Kraeling, Yale UP 1953, which gives facsimiles and square script transcriptions of the Elephantine papyri.) There is not and never has been a generic form of the Aramaic script distinct from the square script which is identical to the Hebrew script (with its Unicode reference glyphs). There is no evidence of complex script behaviour (except that these are all RTL scripts) or of mappings between these styles which are not one to one. There seems to be no evidence of a desire by any user community for separate encoding either of a historic Aramaic script or of variants not in modern use such as Palmyrene and Nabataean. Rather, the user community is confused by the current roadmaps which seem to undermine the current scholarly practice of using Aramaic square script for all ancient (pre-Christian) Aramaic texts. This seems to be a case of unnecessary multiplication of scripts, not requested by scholars, when in fact there are merely glyph variations. In view of this, I call for a review of the roadmaps and in particular of the status of the Aramaic, Palmyrene, Nabataean, Elymaic and Hatran scripts. Serious consideration should be given to unifying these scripts with the Hebrew script, of which they appear to be glyph variants. The separate status of Phoenician may also need to be reconsidered. Note that I am calling for a review only of scripts listed in N2311 as not in current use. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --