From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 11:22:47 EDT
At 05:17 -0700 2004-04-29, Peter Kirk wrote:
>Not really. Acceptance of the proposal would create an expectation
>that Phoenician texts should be encoded with the new Phoenician
>characters, and so that existing practices are wrong and should be
>changed.
That is your unsubstantiated assertion.
>That expectation is of course not acceptable to scholars.
Scholars do what they want.
>Also not acceptable is the inevitable result that Phoenician texts
>will be encoded in two different ways, leading to lack of
>searchability and potentially total confusion.
Utter nonsense. I have samples of Phoenician language text written in
Latin transliteration, in Hebrew transliteration, and in the original
Phoenician script. The Unicode Standard does not exist to enforce
orthographic choices for databases. Pali text likewise is often
written in Myanmar, Sinhala, Devanagari, and Latin scripts.
>>... OTOH rejection of the proposal would pretty well mean
>>that it is never going to be possible for anyone to encode
>>Phoenician text with Phoenician Unicode characters.
>
>No, because rejection is not forever. While the Unicode stability
>policy implies that once a proposal has been accepted that
>acceptance can never be reversed, a proposal which has been rejected
>can be resubmitted and accepted - although presumably the UTC would
>do so only if provided with some good new evidence that the change
>of mind is necessary.
This Phoenician proposal is not a new proposal. Phoenician proposals
have been on the table for more than a decade.
>>Even if there is only a small minority of people who want
>>Phoenician characters encoded, encoding them would not prevent the
>>alleged majority who want to use Hebrew characters to encode
>>Phoenician texts from doing this.
>
>If there is such a small minority, let us hear from them. As far as
>I know this is a minority of one.
Look at the bibliography. Students of the Greek and Latin alphabets
do not claim that those alphabets derived from Hebrew.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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