From: Curtis Clark (jcclark@mockfont.com)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 22:38:52 CDT
on 2004-05-02 16:26 Michael Everson wrote:
> Children learning about the history of their alphabets
I've been following this discussion off and on, and figured I didn't
have much to add, but I can relate to this remark. I was a child, once,
and I had a fascination with scripts and languages that has continued to
the present day. Although I have never been more than a dilettante in
these fields, I'd like to think that what knowledge I have has
positively influenced my long career as a botanist and my more recent
career as a web developer.
In an eighth-grade English class (I was around 14 years old), I wrote a
short story about the ancient inhabitants of Palestine. (It was intended
to be humorous, in the ways of 14-year-old boys.) In that story I
included fictional place names written in what would fit into Michael's
Phoenician block (I believe they were some sort of ancient Canaanite, if
not Phoenician sensu stricto).
I never progressed in my knowledge of Semitic scripts until a couple of
years ago, when my daughter wanted a tattoo that said "peace" in
Aramaic, and I researched enough to realize that Estrangelo Edessa
wasn't likely to have been used to write Aramaic in the time of Jesus.
And with these bits of knowledge, I have been able to follow the
outlines of the discussion.
If Unicode Phoenician had been around when I was 14, I would have used it.
-- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
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