From: Christian Cooke (ccooke@fishamble.net)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 13:13:44 CDT
Hullo,
I'll claim the immunity of the ill-informed in contributing this but...
On 4 May 2004, at 17:04, John Hudson wrote:
>> Michael Everson wrote:
>>
>> No, it is not. If Phoenician letterforms are just a font variant of
>> Square Hebrew then it is reasonable to assume that readers of Square
>> Hebrew will accept them in various contexts. Such as newspaper
>> articles, or advertising copy, or restaurant menus, or wedding
>> invitations. THAT is font switching.
>>
>> I consider this fundamental to script identification.
>
> How do you distinguish those scripts that are rejected as 'ciphers' of
> other scripts from those which you want to encode, if 1:1
> correspondence is not sufficient grounds for unification but visual
> dissimilarity is grounds for disunification?
Surely a cipher is by definition "after the event", i.e. there must be
the parent script before the child. Does it not follow that, by John's
reasoning, if one is no more than a cipher of the other then it is
Hebrew that is the cipher and so the only way Phoenician and Hebrew can
be unified (a suggestion you'll have to assume is suitably showered
with smileys :-) is for the latter to be deprecated and the former
encoded as the /real/ parent script?
Christian
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