Re: Colourful scripts and Aramaic

From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 16:12:09 EDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Colourful scripts"

    On 07/08/2003 13:00, John Cowan wrote:

    >Peter Kirk scripsit:
    >
    >
    >
    >>Is it a principle of Unicode that a new script should not be encoded
    >>because it is one to one correspondence with an existing one, even
    >>though there is no graphical relationship? Well, that is certainly in
    >>conflict with Michael's comments about Aramaic, Samaritan etc.
    >>
    >>
    >
    >No. But it's a principle (an informal one) not to use resources encoding
    >symbol repertoires that are just monalphabetic encryptions of existing
    >language-specific repertoires. Which seems to me (I am willing to be
    >corrected on this) to be what we have here.
    >
    >
    >
    Well, it seems to me that in the case of the Aramaic proposal we don't
    even have that. We have an archaic version of the script which is now
    used mainly for Hebrew, and which many scholars still call Aramaic (in
    distinction from paleo-Hebrew) although Unicode calls it Hebrew. The
    Aramaic glyphs are almost all recognisably the same as or slight
    variants on the Hebrew ones. And Hebrew script is already used,
    uncontroversially, for large corpora of Aramaic e.g. in the Talmud. Why
    a new script for the few surviving examples of ancient Aramaic in this
    script?

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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