From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat Dec 27 2003 - 18:13:41 EST
On 26/12/2003 17:28, Christopher John Fynn wrote:
> ...
>
>My own unscientific gut instinct is to be sympathetic to encoding "dead"
>ancient scripts separately even when they are related since valuable historic
>information may be conveyed simply by the fact a manuscript is written in one
>script or another. That information, which granted may be of more importance
>to palaeographers and epigraphers than to philologists, is no longer so
>apparent when that document is encoded in another script.
>
>
That information can be encoded far more compactly in a single character
or markup item. Anyway, palaeographers and epigraphers are likely to
need to work with images, not plain text or even marked up text. For
philologists, and for general readers, unifying the scripts is much more
convenient. And "general readers" is not a joke, most epigraphic NW
Semitic could be read easily by the Hebrew speaking general public if
presented with modern glyph shapes.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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