From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 09:19:39 CDT
> the
> argument that despite how complex Square Hebrew has become with it
> signs and diacritics and stretched letters and alef-lamed ligatures
> and Yiddish ligatures
The Latin alphabet has 23 letters, IIRC. The Latin alphabet as
encoded in Unicode has hundreds of letters, including many caseless
letters and diacritics of all sizes and shapes and Fraktur ligatures,
but it's still unified with the Alphabet that Virgil used.
> If you people, after all of this discussion, can think that it is
> possible to print a newspaper article in Hebrew language or Yiddish
> in Phoenician letters,
1) Of course it is. Even if it is encoded as a seperate script, we
can always transliterate the text.
2) Of course it isn't. Newspapers appear in an incredibly limited
variety of fonts. You wouldn't sell a newspaper in English in a
Fraktur or Gaelic font, or probably even in a sans-serif font.
> then all I can say is that understanding of
> the fundamentals of script identity is at an all-time low. I'm really
> surprised.
This looks to me like a textbook example where two scripts should
be unified, and none of the things you appeal to seem to be a
factor in any other script unification or disunification. I
understand that sometimes you have to go beyond the textbook, but
I'm surprised by the people who seem to have trouble understanding
why people would argue against it.
> You can map one-to-one to Hebrew? So what? You can map
> one-to-one to Syriac and Greek, and probably others.
Greek has 24 characaters, with different character properties (such
as being LTR). No mapping could be bijective. Syriac is cursive.
Hebrew has the same 22 characters, with the same character properties.
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