From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Tue May 04 2004 - 23:07:22 CDT
Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 03/05/2004 05:19, Michael Everson wrote:
>
>> ... Germans who don't read Sütterlin recognize it as what it is -- a
>> hard-to-read way that everyone used to write German not so long ago.
>
>
>
> And modern Hebrews recognise paleo-Hebrew as a now hard-to-read way that
> everyone used to write Hebrew a rather longer time ago.
No, they don't. Hardly any modern Hebrew-speaker even knows that there
was *ever* an older form of the Hebrew alphabet (really, I've spoken to
a lot of them). The ones I showed examples to thought it was some kind
of trick or puzzle, like a bunch of strange designs and you have to
figure out the pattern and work out what the next one should be, or
something. Someone thought they were strangely-written numbers.
Show a Sütterlin text to an English-speaker and the most clueless answer
you'll get is "it's really lousy handwriting; I can't make sense of
it." Not "it's a bunch of funny symbols."
~mark
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