From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon May 24 2004 - 12:47:04 CDT
On 24/05/2004 09:00, Christopher Fynn wrote:
> ...
> Even if there is no defined mapping between the two scripts, it won't
> be difficult to make one. Interleaved collation can be achieved
> creating and using a tailored collation table. There's no rocket
> science involved in doing this. Once person has created these they
> can share them with the community of Semitic scholars that has a need
> for them.
>
> Why are you making these things out to be difficult? If you've no one
> else to do it, I volunteer to make a interleaved collation table
> for Phoenician & Hebrew and make a utility to trans-code from
> Phoenician to Hebrew - once Phoenician is encoded. These should take
> much less time write than your responses in this discussion.
> - Chris
>
Well, are you volunteering to rewrite for me popular word processor,
spreadsheet and database applications and web search engines which
currently don't support tailored collation, so that they support your
tailoring? That's the real issue, not defining the tailoring which is
almost trivial.
On 24/05/2004 10:12, James Kass wrote:
>The Thread From Hell continues.
>
>
Well, if you have a problem with that you can always encourage its death
by keeping quiet yourself! ;-)
>Peter Kirk writes,
>
>
>
>>>And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be
>>>fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used
>>>the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's
>>>not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.)
>>>
>>>
>>Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they
>>would have said "yes" because the script used in their time for Hebrew
>>was very similar to their own script.
>>
>>
>
>Of course, they'd have said "no" because modern Hebrew didn't exist
>in their time. So, they'd not even know what modern Hebrew was. The
>script used in their time for Hebrew wasn't "very similar to their own
>script"; it *was* their own script. "Palaeo-Hebrew" is a modern term
>and a modern concept.
>
>
>
Precisely my point. For the Phoenicians, "modern Hebrew" was as spoken
by their contemporaries, which was a dialect variation of their own
language (structurally, although not by the armies test) and was written
in the same script, with only slightly different glyph shapes. The
distinction between palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew scripts/"diascripts"
is one which arose later by gradual continuous change.
>
>
>>... Very
>>likely these font developers were simply confused by the licensing rules
>>for Times New Roman.
>>
>>
>
>Yeah, that's probably it.
>
>
>
>>Well, these Ebionites are not scholars but a revival of an ancient sect
>>somewhere midway between Judaism and Christianity.
>>
>>
>
>Would you say that none of these Ebionites are scholars?
>
>
I don't know enough about the Ebionites to say. I didn't mean to imply
anything negative about them. But they are a distinct community (though
possibly with some overlap) from the recognised scholarly community of
Semiticists.
>
>
>>So one thing which this does demonstrate is that there is a community of
>>users other than scholars who are currently encoding paleo-Hebrew texts
>>with Hebrew characters.
>>
>>
>
>Ever ask yourself why they do this? Is it possible that they do this
>in order to get RTL layout? Is it possible that they do this in order
>to be able to transliterate via fonts absent a standard Phoenician range?
>
>
Well, it is possible. But I suspect it is more likely that they
considered (rightly or wrongly) that the correct Unicode characters to
use for Hebrew language texts, whatever glyphs are to be used for
displaying them, are the characters in the Hebrew block. Arguably they
were confused by the Unicode distinction between script and language.
But the result (whatever the motivation might have been) is that they
have developed fonts with palaeo- glyphs for the Unicode Hebrew
characters, and presumably texts to go with those fonts. Therefore they
have a stake in this being the approved Unicode encoding for palaeo-Hebrew.
>
>
>>Good point. But of course this (alleged) person interested in Phoenician
>>but not Hebrew will not be helped if more than one encoding is permitted
>>for Phoenician. Anyway, this is a case where language tagging should be
>>used rather than a separate script.
>>
>>
>
>And we use language tagging in plain text how?
>
>
The context here was searching the web for Phoenician texts. Texts on
websites should not be plain text but should be marked with their
language. Of course we can't be sure that they will be, but then we
can't be sure of what encoding will be used.
>...
>
>
>>Good point, Peter. No one has yet shown that anyone cannot be served
>>*without* a separately encoded Phoenician script, only that a few people
>>want it.
>>
>>
>
>Phoenician users can be served with Latin-hack transliteration fonts,
>in other words, without Unicode. But, can they be well-served?
>
>
No, not least because they have to use RLO...PDF or visual ordering. But
they can be well served by Hebrew fonts with variant glyphs.
On 24/05/2004 09:22, James Kass wrote:
> ...
>
>>Because they have yet to see a good argument for
>>why anyone would need to make such a distinction?
>>
>>
>
>Because it's there? If Sir Edmund Hillary (hope the name's spelled
>right) had awaited some kind of an epiphany revealing a better
>reason, would he have ever made it to the top?
>
>
Hillary and Tensing's achievement was a great one, and one which did not
harm the interests of anyone else, well, not very much.
But I hope that the UTC will require better reasons to accept a proposal
than "Because it's there", especially if acceptance harms the interests
of other people.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon May 24 2004 - 12:47:49 CDT