From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sat Dec 27 2003 - 18:12:22 EST
At 14:44 -0800 2003-12-27, Peter Kirk wrote:
>Doug, thanks for making this new point re ancient Semitic scripts.
>Fundamental identity of the characters is a strong reason for
>unifying these scripts as well as Han scripts. As I wrote a few days
>ago, ALEF is ALEF is ALEF is ALEF, whatever glyph shapes are used.
And ALPHA and A, are just the same.
We disunified Nuskhuri from Mkhedruli, and familiarity and legibility
were indeed criteria for the disunification. Mark Shoulson has just
given his expert testimony that, one-to-one relation to the Semitic
repertoire or not, Samaritan needs to be considered different from
Hebrew. I'd say he'd probably feel the same about the older
Phoenician as well.
I will say it again: You and every Semiticist specialist on the face
of the earth can encode every Phoenician document transliterated into
Hebrew script in your databases and never even look at an eventually
encoded Phoenician script. That usage still doesn't mean that the
Phoenician script is a glyph variant of square Hebrew even if they
share a repertoire.
Even in antiquity these scripts were used distinctively in a number
of instances, which will be discussed in the proposal documents in
due course.
Scripts develop, and differentiate. The nodes of Semitic which we
will encode have not all been investigated, but, like Indic, it makes
sense to encode more than one of them. I believe that the distinction
between Phoenician and Square Hebrew should be maintained in plain
text; font markup is not sufficient.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Dec 27 2003 - 18:39:51 EST