L2/03-455

Date/Time:    Mon Dec 22 07:27:08 EST 2003
Contact:      peterkirk@qaya.org
Report Type:  Error Report

The Roadmap to the BMP (http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp/) needs a  
correction. The current situation is confusing to scholars of Aramaic and  
other ancient Semitic languages. Aramaic is listed as one of the "scripts  
for which proposals have been formally submitted to the UTC or to WG2.  
There is generally a link to the formal proposal." But the formal proposal  
to which it is linked, http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2042.pdf, is  
not for the generic Aramaic alphabet described in  
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2311.pdf, but for the Palmyrene  
style or script which is listed as a separate script in N2311 and is  
roadmapped in the SMP. There is no formal proposal for the generic Aramaic  
alphabet, and so the status of Aramaic in the roadmap should be changed to  
"scripts for which detailed proposals have not yet been written", and the  
link to N2042 removed. N2042 might be listed instead as a proposal for  
Palmyrene.

The situation is highly confusing to scholars of Aramaic because there is  
no clear definition of what script is intended to be the roadmapped  
Aramaic. The voluminous literature in classical and modern Aramaic is  
regularly printed either in the Hebrew script, which is known to scholars  
as the Aramaic square script, or in the Syriac script; most of it was  
originally written in one of these scripts. Other scripts are used by small  
communities or for special purposes, but these are either already in  
Unicode (Latin, Cyrillic etc) or separately roadmapped (Samaritan, Mandaic  
etc). Otherwise there is only a very small corpus of inscriptional, papyrus  
etc material, mostly written with the same alphabet as the Aramaic square  
script but with a variety of glyph styles and shapes. When not working with  
facsimiles, scholars regularly transcribe these texts into unpointed  
Aramaic square script, i.e. unpointed Hebrew script. (See for example "The  
Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri", edited by E.G. Kraeling, Yale UP 1953,  
which gives facsimiles and square script transcriptions of the Elephantine  
papyri.) There is not and never has been a generic form of the Aramaic  
script distinct from the square script which is identical to the Hebrew  
script (with its Unicode reference glyphs).

There is no evidence of complex script behaviour (except that these are  
all RTL scripts) or of mappings between these styles which are not one to  
one.

There seems to be no evidence of a desire by any user community for  
separate encoding either of a historic Aramaic script or of variants not in  
modern use such as Palmyrene and Nabataean. Rather, the user community is  
confused by the current roadmaps which seem to undermine the current  
scholarly practice of using Aramaic square script for all ancient  
(pre-Christian) Aramaic texts. This seems to be a case of unnecessary  
multiplication of scripts, not requested by scholars, when in fact there  
are merely glyph variations.

In view of this, I call for a review of the roadmaps and in particular of  
the status of the Aramaic, Palmyrene, Nabataean, Elymaic and Hatran  
scripts. Serious consideration should be given to unifying these scripts  
with the Hebrew script, of which they appear to be glyph variants. The  
separate status of Phoenician may also need to be reconsidered. Note that I  
am calling for a review only of scripts listed in N2311 as not in current  
use.


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