From: John Cowan (cowan@ccil.org)
Date: Tue Jun 08 2004 - 09:52:55 CDT
Peter Constable scripsit:
> > > In that sense, treating Phoenician as a script variant of Hebrew
> > > is a big win for many of the users of the script, since they
> > > would have a hard time deciphering the bizarre (to them) script
> > > variant but have no problem reading texts originally written in
> > > it in different fonts.
>
> I didn't understand that statement the first time round, and still am
> not sure I understand it. (The antecedent for the last occurrence of
> "it" isn't clear to me, so I'm having difficulty interpreting the whole
> thing, apart from the matter of whether the point makes sense.)
I interpret it to mean that if you know Hebrew, you can read text in
Old Hebrew or Phoenician or whatever, provided you can get past the
script barrier. For such people, there is some advantage in encoding
these old texts with Hebrew characters, since a simple font change will
convert between the authentic and the intelligible.
By the same token, there would be some advantage to Croats wishing to
read Serbian if it's encoded in an encoding that can be rendered with
either Latin or Cyrillic letters (or digraphs); such a thing could
easily be constructed and mapped to Unicode, thanks to the Croat-specific
digraph compatibility characters present. That wouldn't make such
an encoding a Good Thing in the wider world, though.
-- He made the Legislature meet at one-horse John Cowan tank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that jcowan@reutershealth.com hardly nobody could get there and most of http://www.reutershealth.com the leaders would stay home and let him go http://www.ccil.org/~cowan to work and do things as he pleased. --Mencken, Declaration of Independence
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