From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 11:26:41 EDT
At 07:53 -0700 2003-07-15, Peter Kirk wrote:
>VVELLIHOPEVVEVVILL... ahem... Well, I hope we will count ancient
>Roman as Latin script rather than add to Unicode yet another new
>script which is almost identical to an existing one. But then it
>would make more sense than proposals to add new scripts or partial
>scripts for biblical Hebrew and for Aramaic, for at least ancient
>Roman inscriptions can be distinguished from nearly all modern texts
>by being in a different language.
Nope. The Aramaic ranged far beyond the middle east and itself -- not
Hebrew -- was the forerunner of Syriac, Manichaean, Sogdian,
Mandaean, Parthian, Avestan, Pahlavi, and other scripts.
>But the existing Hebrew characters in Unicode are already in use for
>biblical Hebrew texts, as well as for what are probably the majority
>of surviving examples of ancient Aramaic which is not Syriac - the
>Aramaic portions of the Hebrew Bible, and presumably also the
>Aramaic parts of the Talmud and other ancient Jewish writings.
Aramaic is not only attested in Biblical texts. From Daniels &
Bright: "Aramaic was the lingua franca of Southwest Asia from early
in the first millennium BCE until the Arab Conquest in the mid
seventh century CE."
>Otherwise we end up with a new script for a few ancient inscriptions
>which are only slightly different in glyph shapes and repertoire and
>in language from an extensive corpus in an existing Unicode block.
We need to do further research on the subject, but it seems to me
that Late Aramaic is still a candidate for encoding.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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