From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sat May 22 2004 - 09:13:29 CDT
At 06:46 -0700 2004-05-22, Peter Kirk wrote:
>Or are we to expect that as soon as Phoenician is encoded
>separately, the majority of Semitic scholars who have always opposed
>this will come under all kinds of pressure to use the encoded script
>which was added just to meet the requirements of a couple of people,
>one of whom is not even a Semitic scholar?
Semiticists do not "own" the Phoenician script. The Universal
Character Set will encode the important writing systems of the world.
Phoenician is one of these.
>The fear is rather that a few people, who are not true Semitic
>scholars, will embrace the new range, and by doing so will make
>things much harder for the majority who don't need and don't want
>the new encoding. One of the original purposes of Unicode was to
>move away from the old situation in which many different
>incompatible encodings were used for the same language and script.
>We don't want to get back into that situation.
You are already in that situation. Phoenician texts are often written
in Latin transliteration. I have dozens and dozens of examples.
Written by honest-to-goodness real Semiticists, too.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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