From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Dec 19 2003 - 16:39:32 EST
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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