From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Apr 30 2004 - 14:04:04 EDT
Michael Everson wrote:
>> Okay, perhaps we're getting somewhere and beginning to understand each
>> other. What you are saying, in effect, is that there is already a de
>> facto unification of Phoenician and Hebrew encoding, employed by a
>> significant user group.
> But there is no de facto unification. This script has been on the books
> for ages. This script has been described by historians of writing as
> distinct from Hebrew for two hundred years.
There does appear to be a de facto unification *in the practice of many semiticists*,
particularly when dealing with ancient Hebrew texts written with 'Phoenician' letters. I
think this is perfectly understandable, given that the language is Hebrew regardless of
what the letters look like: why would they have thought to encode such texts as anything
other than Hebrew? I'm not saying that this is a reason not to encode what I favour
calling the 'Ancient North Semitic' script, only that we need to acknowledge that there is
a genuine question about how ancient Hebrew texts in that script should be encoded. Simply
repeating 'They're different scripts' is not addressing that question. It is very obvious
that, among semiticists, there is a prevailing concept of a single 22 letter abjad. I'm
not saying that this concept should determine what gets encoded in Unicode, only that we
should acknowledge and address the confusion that stems from the incompatibility of
contrary views of the semitic script universe.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com I often play against man, God says, but it is he who wants to lose, the idiot, and it is I who want him to win. And I succeed sometimes In making him win. - Charles Peguy
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