Re: Phoenician

From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sat May 08 2004 - 10:19:45 CDT

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    At 16:59 -0700 2004-05-07, E. Keown wrote:

    >You seem to have learned a lot from Michael Everson. Your basic
    >procedure is simply to ignore all objections and pretend they are
    >stupid.

    I have not ignored your objections. I have rejected them because they
    are inadequate to the task of encoding all of the world's writing
    systems in the Universal Character Set.

    Professional Semiticists are not the only surviving cultural owners
    of the world's Middle Eastern historical cultural heritage.

    You can transliterate any text in the world in to Square Hebrew if it
    makes you happy and makes sense to you. You're doing that now. Keep
    on doing it.

    But if Hellenicists, Indo-Europeanists, and script specialists see
    "Phoenician" as the important, proximate source of the Greek writing
    system, if they would *not* transliterate it into Hebrew, and if they
    would like to see it encoded, since it would make it easier for them
    represent Phoenician in texts about Greek, without having to resort
    to hacks to prevent it from being represented as Square Hebrew, who
    are Semiticists to say they are wrong?

    The Universal Character Set is universal.

    It appears that I sometimes have difficulty expressing *why* things
    should be encoded. I'm not sure I can do much about that. I think I'm
    a good judge of when to unify and when not to unify nevertheless.

    -- 
    Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
    


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