From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Sat May 22 2004 - 21:41:04 CDT
Peter Kirk wrote:
> 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.
That's awfully elitist, isn't it? "Some *non*-scholars want it (if
they'll embrace it, it follows that they'd want it if offered), but we
can't be swayed by the desires of the hoi polloi." Non-scholars get to
use Unicode too, and have a right to influence what gets in it. Just
because the userbase isn't the people you thought it would be doesn't
mean they don't count.
> On 21/05/2004 06:22, saqqara wrote:
>
>> ... Apparently, the majority view here and elsewhere seems to be that
>> Phoenician is a distinctive script family. If so, then the only
>> issues are those factual elements of Michaels proposal and there is
>> no need to continue the discussion here of whether it is needed at all.
>
>
>
> Actually, this is not the majority view, at least here. It is the
> repeatedly expressed view of one script expert, and a few others have
> supported him (although many of these know little about the script),
> but the number of those who have disagreed seems to be larger, and
> that includes most of the experts on Semitic scripts who have
> expressed an opinion.
And more elitism. And also inaccuracy. I note that you are pleased to
count Michael Everson and everyone else together as "one script expert
[(and his supporters)]." That's weak math for voting. What's more,
we've heard from a few other people (e.g. S. George Khalaf) who support
a separate Phoenician. And not a single Hebrew-reader I spoke to,
native or not, could even conceive of Paleo-Hebrew being a font-variant
of Hebrew. They found the proposition laughable.
I don't think the "majority vs. one or two malcontents" picture that
you're drawing here is even vaguely reminiscent of reality.
~mark
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