From: Karljürgen Feuerherm (cuneiform@rogers.com)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 18:03:41 EDT
My knowledge of Aramaic script is a little scanty, but my understanding is
more or less the same as Peter's.
Which leads me to suggest that encoding Aramaic separately would be a bit
like encoding Old Akkadian (Cuneiform) separately from NeoAssyrian
(Cuneiform). Which would be a bit silly (and not what we are planning in
that arena).... Note that some people are even willing to argue that the
substrate languages might be considered distinct, too--in case that is the
argument which would be applied to Aramaic.
K
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Kirk" <peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com>
To: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Cc: <unicode@unicode.org>; "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 4:12 PM
Subject: Re: Colourful scripts and Aramaic
> 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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