From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 00:50:59 EDT
Dean Snyder wrote:
>Kenneth Whistler wrote at 6:15 PM on Wednesday, April 28, 2004:
>
>A. Does Phoenician constitute a "landmark" in the Canaanite
> script continuum? Yes/No
>
>
>
>It depends ;-)
>
>As I've stated on the Hebrew list, my reticence to the proposal is based
>on two factors:
>
>1) The script is wrongly called "Phoenician" - the same script was used
>for Old Phoenician, Old Aramaic, Old Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and
>Edomite. That is why I propose it be named "[Old] Canaanite".
>
>2) Discussions of this proposal have always been closely linked with
>proposals to encode Aramaic and Samaritan. And this is where we step into
>really turbulent waters (to keep my metaphor alive). My only suggestion
>has been that we slow down, do not proceed precipitously, and get more
>scholarly input.
>
Samaritan (and likely Aramaic) you have to watch out for: unlike
"Phoenician" or ancient Canaanite, these have *modern* users who are not
academics, but people who use the scripts as living, working ways of
writing ordinary things. It isn't just scholars who need to be heard on
those. (yes, I am in touch with modern Samaritans including a very
prominent person in Samaritan culture for decades, and also with a
preëminent scholar of Samaritan manuscripts. We're working on it).
For reasons I doubt I could explain, much less defend, I would see
Samaritan disunified from "Hebrew" and from Phoenician/Old Canaanite,
etc. Certainly Samaritan has non-letter glyphs that are unique to
Samaritan usage (vowels, cantillations, etc), but that in itself doesn't
prove much. I tend to see (Modern) Hebrew, Samaritan, and
just-about-everything-else as the divisions--which I guess shows how my
knowledge and research are distributed.
~mark
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