RE: [hebrew] Re: Aramaic unification and information retrieval

From: Jony Rosenne (rosennej@qsm.co.il)
Date: Fri Dec 19 2003 - 16:49:52 EST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "RE: [hebrew] Re: Aramaic unification and information retrieval"

    So what about Chinese, Japanese and Korean? Was it wrong to unify them?

    Jony

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
    > Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 11:40 PM
    > To: Jony Rosenne
    > Cc: Unicode@Unicode.Org
    > Subject: RE: [hebrew] Re: Aramaic unification and
    > information retrieval
    >
    > Jony Rosenne wrote:
    > > Michael Everson
    > > > Samaritan and Phoenician are not font variants of Hebrew/Square
    > > > Hebrew/Jewish or whatever else you want to call it.
    > >
    > > But Square Hebrew IS a font variant of Ancient Hebrew or
    > Phoenician or
    > > Canaanite, whatever you want to call it, and so is Samaritan.
    >
    > Do not mix script families (or genetic history) with their actual use.
    > Each time a script has evolved in a parallel way for other languages,
    > it has introduced its own distinctive features.
    >
    > With your argument, we would have to unify the Latin, Greek and
    > Cyrillic scripts, because they have the same origin. Now move onto
    > their common Phenician origin and we have to unify it with Semitic
    > scripts... What disunified them was the writing direction, which was
    > not fixed in early scripts that allowed boustrophedon ordering,
    > and that had simpler designs with more independant glyphs, and the
    > way the various glyphs combine to create sometimes new letters.
    >
    > For me two scripts that are different enough so that a text written
    > in one script will have imprecise matches in another, and will be
    > hardly recognizable by readers is a candidate to a separate encoding,
    > because it starts its own family of supplementary letters specific
    > to some families of languages needing these extensions.
    >
    > Some of these extensions do not have equivalent in the origin
    > script, and sometimes (often?) their usage start to split with
    > distinct semantics (see for example the various forms of
    > the so-called "Tamazigh" script which is certainly better
    > represented as a family of scripts rather than a single script,
    > with as much differences between them than between Greek and
    > Cyrillic).
    >
    >
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