Re: Aramaic unification and information retrieval

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat Dec 20 2003 - 16:14:37 EST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "RE: Aramaic unification and information retrieval"

    On 20/12/2003 11:50, Christopher John Fynn wrote:

    >>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.
    >>
    >>
    >
    >On this basis it could be argued that fraktur / black letter should be encoded
    >separately from latin.
    >
    >- Chris
    >
    >
    >
    Indeed. Here are parts of my reply to Philippe on the Hebrew list:

    > There are no distinctive features other than glyph shapes
    > distinguishing Hebrew, Phoenician, Samaritan and "Early Aramaic" as
    > proposed in http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2042.pdf - apart
    > from the pointing added later to Hebrew and Samaritan.

    > [to the suggestion that "a text written in one script will have
    > imprecise matches in another":] This does not apply to the Semitic
    > scripts, which have a precise one to one mapping.

    > If unrecognisably different glyph shapes alone are sufficient to
    > justify encoding separate scripts, I will propose several new scripts
    > e.g. black letter Latin, italic Cyrillic, cursive modern Hebrew,
    > Nastaliq Arabic (actually the evidence on the bidi list today gives a
    > much stronger case for this being encoded as a separate script), three
    > separate Syriac styles, etc etc. And then there are scripts which have
    > been rejected as ciphers, on the basis that they differ from existing
    > scripts only in glyph shape.

    (Although I did later say off list that these new script proposals were
    not to be taken as a serious threat!)

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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