Aramaic, Samaritan, Phoenician

From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Jul 14 2003 - 19:03:47 EDT

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    On 14/07/2003 15:15, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

    >http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/index.html
    >
    >So those charts are always a good place to start checking
    >when wanting to know what the status of some obscure
    >script might be in Unicode.
    >
    >
    >
    Glancing through these roadmaps I came across proposals for Aramaic,
    Samaritan and Phoenician. These alphabets look to me like glyph variants
    of the Hebrew alphabet. In fact the regular Hebrew alphabet, as in the
    reference glyphs, was originally an Aramaic alphabet very like the
    Aramaic one in the proposal. This replaced the "old" Hebrew alphabet
    used before in inscriptions from the 6th century BCE, and occasionally
    later, which looks much more like Phoenician as proposed.

    Some parts of the Hebrew Bible are actually in the Aramaic language, but
    in exactly the same script as the Hebrew parts.

    So is there a real justification for separate alphabets here?

    On the other hand, I did find a separate use for the Samaritan letter
    shin. This is used in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere as a text critical
    symbol, denoting the Samaritan Pentateuch, a variant form of part of the
    Bible. 

    -- 
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/

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