From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 05:12:42 EDT
On 28/04/2004 21:50, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> ...
> 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).
On Samaritan, I agree. But where are your modern users of a distinctive
Aramaic script? Well, there is Syriac; and there is the Hebrew script
which is often known among scholars as Aramaic script, to distinguish it
from paleo-Hebrew, and because it was used for Aramaic before it was
used for Hebrew. And Aramaic is also written in Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic
and maybe other already defined scripts. But I have never seen any
evidence of any other distinctive modern Aramaic script. If you or
anyone has any, please let me know. If not, you should drop your "likely".
>
> 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.
I tend to agree, but my limitations are similar.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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