From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 11:12:24 EDT
At 10:42 -0400 2004-04-29, Dean Snyder wrote:
>I don't view Phoenician to Hebrew as transliteration, particularly for
>Old Hebrew - they are the same script.
No they are not. Phoenician is the mother. Her
most direct daughter is Samaritan (which will not
be unified with Hebrew). Another daughter was an
intermediate Aramaic script which itself had many
children, only one of which was Jewish Hebrew as
used in Israel today. (Others include Pahlavi and
Brahmi. Whether that intermediate Aramaic
deserves encoding is not under discussion now and
has nothing do to with the Phoenician proposal.)
Phoenician can be, and often is, transcribed and
published by Semiticists in Hebrew
transliteration. There is no problem with that
practice. It's also often transliterated into
Latin.
Handwritten Hebrew script and Sütterlin are not
analogous examples, and are not adequate
arguments for unifying Hebrew with Phoenician.
Hebrew, friends, is ONLY ONE of Phoenician's
children. Why should she be unified with her
Hebrew daughter? Why not her Old Italic, or
Greek, or other daughters?
The Greek and Etruscan alphabets do not derive from the Hebrew alphabet.
I do not propose to "disunify" Phoenician from
Hebrew. In my view, Phoenician has never been,
and cannot be, unified with Hebrew. They are
different scripts. They are not font variants in
any sense of the term.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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