AW: Greek/Etruscan/Gothic Unification Proposal

From: Marc Wilhelm Kuester (marc.kuester@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de)
Date: Tue Nov 25 1997 - 11:14:44 EST


John Cowan wrote:
>We don't go further and unify Georgian with Greek or Latin, because the
>letters are unrecognizably different from any sort of Greek. But this
>consideration doesn't apply to Gothic or Etruscan, which closely
>resemble the sorts of Greek writing that were in use during the
>appropriate span of time.

In my oppinion this position is quite beside the point. The question is not
how similar Etruscan, Coptic, Gothic etc. scripts were to the Greek
alphabeth at the time of their derival or how closely they are related, but
how their usage is handled *today*. It may be a triviality, but Unicode is
*not* used to write ancient texts --- Etruscans did not know anything about
ISO 10646 --- but to fulfill the needs of (in this case) scholars in the
respective fields *today*.

>They would doubtless be unreadable with
>a modern Greek font, but modern Greek text would be hard to read
>in a font modeled after 5th-century B.C.E. inscriptions,

Therefore, the answer cannot be: Well, the Etruscan script was similar to
Greek in the 5th-century BC. It was. But that's not the way scholars need
it today. Common usage is to print ancient Greek texts in modern fonts, not
in the way of 5th-centry BC inscriptions [!]. Common usage is likewise to
print Coptic texts in a Coptic script which is quite distinct from the
modern Greek script. Likewise for Gothic. Whatever they once were, they are
now distinct scripts which need distinct Unicode code ranges.
  This may be illogical, but so things are, and Unicode, if it wants to get
any foothold into academic circles, must cater for that urgent need. It
cannot be up to the Unicode Consortium to judge on prevalent standards in
the academe. Greek and Coptic passages --- and likewise the other scripts
--- must be distinguishable in plain text, in databases or the like,
without recourse to any higher level protocol.

  Regards,

        Marc Kuster

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