Re: Old Hebrew, extra Uniscribe work (Re: Arabic encoding model (alas, static!))

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Jul 07 2005 - 13:21:51 CDT

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: Old Hebrew, extra Uniscribe work (Re: Arabic encoding model (alas, static!))"

    [Warning: the following contains discussion of Phoenician.]

    Michael Everson wrote:

    >> This would tend to prove that Phoenician, which I was unaware was
    >> to be encoded, is just an archaic form of Hebrew (some ancient
    >> Phoenician inscriptions would be hard to separate linguistically from
    >> Old Hebrew I take it) and that it isn't really worth any implementer
    >> spending time on this script.

    > That isn't true.

    To be fair, part of Ashraf wrote seems perfectly true: 'some ancient Phoenician
    inscriptions would be hard to separate linguistically from Old Hebrew'. There are
    fragments regarding which no one is sure whether the language written is Hebrew or another
    language, and consequently whether the letters are 'Palaeo-Hebrew' or 'Phoenician'; the
    fragments are not large enough to determine the language from the content.

    Much depends on whether one considers Old Hebrew to have been written in an archaic form
    of the Hebrew script or in what Unicode has chosen to encode as 'Phoenician', and which I
    would call something like 'Old Canaanite'. After many months of debate, I've come to the
    conclusion that both views are valid, and simply depend on whether one intends to *encode*
    a given text based on language identification (i.e. Hebrew) or on visual appearance (i.e.
    'Phoenician'). Of course, the glyph display can reflect the visual appearance regardless
    of what encoding is used.

    Regarding additions to Uniscribe for Phoenician, I really don't think anyone needs to
    worry about this. Peter has indicated, quite simply, that MS doesn't implement or make
    announcements about things that are not formally part of Unicode yet. And very wise they
    are too. But I don't think there is any reason to doubt that Phoenician support will be
    implemented since, ironically, it can be built on top of the Hebrew shaping engine
    relatively easily (as was Thaana support).

    John Hudson

    -- 
    Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC        tiro@tiro.com
    Currently reading:
    Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was
    War (revised edition), by Gwynne Dyer
    God's secret agents, by Alice Hogge
    


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