From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Sun Jun 06 2004 - 15:50:17 CDT
> Scholars of Semitic languages do *not* have a monopoly on the heritage
> of ancient writing systems. There are other people in the world besides
> them (a few),
"The heritage of ancient writing systems." All of a sudden these letters
are incredibly important (despite the fact you could take every class
some major universities offer and not hear word one about them), and suddenly
all these people who don't know anything about Phoenician have a huge vested
interest in the matter.
Let's be honest; the only people who matter in the least when discussing
a script is the people who actually use it. And all evidence presented here
indicates that scholars of Semitic languages--that is, the people who can
actually read the stuff written in the script--are, not surprisingly, the
majority users of Phoenician.
> and some of them wish to use Phoenician letters distinctly
> from Square Hebrew, and their desires and needs are *EVERY* *BIT* as
> important as those of your precious Semiticists.
No, they aren't. The people who use the script are the most important
concerns.
> since the scholars in question demonstrably do
> NOT need a single encoding: they've been managing okay without one for
> quite some time.
Like everyone else in the world. By that reasoning, we shouldn't have
bothered with Unicode.
> there will not be a unique encoding in use by Semitic scholars for a
> *long* time, whether or not Phoenician is ever encoded).
Just like there isn't for Russian. Does that mean suddenly all right to
seperate the Russian p and Serbian p?
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