From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 14:30:17 EDT
On 15/07/2003 11:14, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
>What ultimately is important is whether the *users* of a
>Unicode encoding for Aramaic would be better served by
>treating certain historical texts across SW Asia as variants
>of Hebrew (or Syriac) and encoding them accordingly, or
>better served by having a distinct character encoding to
>represent those texts.
>
>I don't think you can discover that by trying to analyze the
>script characteristics axiomatically.
>
>The main reason for separately encoding Coptic, rather than
>maintaining what we now recognize to be a mistaken unification
>with the Greek script, is that it is less useful to people
>who want to represent Coptic texts to have it be encoded
>as a variant of Greek than it is to have it be encoded as a
>distinct script.
>
>--Ken
>
>
>
>
Thank you for this helpful clarification - the whole posting
I think that what might be helpful is to get an idea of how ancient
scripts like Phoenician and Aramaic are represented in modern scholarly
publications. I guess they are commonly transliterated. But when they
are not, I wonder if they are represented by copies of actual ancient
glyphs, or by the equivalent Hebrew or Syriac etc letters. Well, I don't
have the answer immediately, but I may be able to find out. What I can
tell you is that in the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon all Aramaic
words, including those from inscriptions, are represented in Hebrew
script. But so are ancient south Arabian inscriptions. But Arabic,
Syriac and Ethiopic are represented in their own scripts, and Akkadian
cuneiform is transliterated. But this work does of course have a bias
towards Hebrew. this dictionary dates from 1906, so it hardly represents
contemporary practice.
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
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