From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Tue Dec 23 2003 - 11:05:22 EST
Michael Everson wrote:
> Masonic scholars apparently differentiate
> between Hebrew and Samaritan.
Everyone apparently differentiates between Hebrew and Samaritan. They
look different. How could you not differentiate between them?
But medieval and modern scholars apparently differentiate between
Carolingian, blackletter and Uncial scripts which Unicode mostly treats
as variants of the Latin script (except for distinguishing "Fraktur"
forms as distinct in Mathematical Alphanumerics). Howe could you not
differentiate between them? They look different.
Modern users differentiate between Italic and Roman and Sans-serif and
so forth. They look different.
Some scholars strongly differentiate between Chinese and Japanese
writing systems.
I understand there was strong pressure to distinguish Iranian Arabic
script from other Arabic scripts.
That different "styles" of writing are distinguished from one another
by and are sometimes called different scripts, is not *alone* reason to
code them separately within Unicode as you well know. The words "style"
and "script" have fuzzy usage. "Script" is use in varying contexts to
distinguish an minimum between two different styles of what is obviously
the same writing system and at maximum to distinguish between two
writing system totally unrelated to each other built on entirely
different principles.
Unfortunately I can't think of any better word in English.
Whether Samaritan should or should not be unified with the script
Unicode calls Hebrew or whether it should be unified with Paleo-Hebrew
or whether Samaritan, Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician should be unified and
so forth is arguable.
That doesn't mean that an obvious conclusion might not be reached once
the arguments on one side and the other are set forth.
Whether fraktur alphabetic characters and italic alphabetic characters
and so forth should be distinguished from other alphabetic characters in
mathematical plain text notation is also arguable. But reasons for the
Unicode consortium making the decision it did (rather than simply
telling mathematicians that what they wanted just wasn't plain text) do
appear in TUS.
It is only through such arguments set forth clearly that we can see what
is most *logical* and (often more important) what is most *useful*.
No-one is arguing that Hebrew and some forms of Aramaic are different
scripts.
The question (coming from users of these scripts) is whether the scripts
(or styles) are different enough to warrant separate encoding within
Unicode, whether they are not better unified in encoding.
One can still distinguish them though markup when required, just as one
does Chinese and Japanese or Uncial scripts and Roman scripts or various
Runic styles.
Jim Allan
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