From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 23:04:30 EDT
From: Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>
>
> Nothing, to my mind, illustrates the utter aridity of the
> discussion that has been going on today than the fact that
> the essential core of the encoding proposal for Phoenician
> has lain dormant for 12 years with *NO* controversy about
> the identity of the characters. And not a *SINGLE* comment
> has been made, through the 17 yards of discussion on the
> list today, about any technical detail of Michael's
> encoding proposal -- not even about the one and only possibly
> controversial aspect I can see in it, the proposal to encode a
> PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR character
I don't know enough about the script or its usages to do much
other than comment on any inconsistencies within the proposal
itself, and it didn't really interest me too much, so I didn't look
too hard at it. (I also only contributed a few inches of the yards
of discussion, as a result.)
However, now that you've piqued my interest enough to look,
I see several potential problems with PHOENICIAN WORD
SEPARATOR. First of all, based on its behavior in Figure 2,
it looks like it is a word terminator rather than a word separator.
Not only that, but the behavior exhibited by the example in
Figure 3, where it does serve as a separator suggests a
character with category Zs and Bidi Class WS instead of
Po and R respectively. It might even be viewed as unifiable
with OGHAM SPACE MARK.
Further, the difference between the behavior shown in the two
examples suggest that it might be better to encode them as
two separate characters, with the dotted separator possibly
being unified with OGHAM SPACE MARK depending upon
where exactly the dot is placed. (I don't think unification is
likely, but given the similarity in form and function of the two
characters, it should at least be considered.)
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