Re: Revised Phoenician proposal

From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Sun Jun 06 2004 - 09:55:10 CDT

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    Scholars of Semitic languages do *not* have a monopoly on the heritage
    of ancient writing systems. There are other people in the world besides
    them (a few), and some of them wish to use Phoenician letters distinctly
    from Square Hebrew, and their desires and needs are *EVERY* *BIT* as
    important as those of your precious Semiticists. Note that some of
    these people you are treating as negligible are respected professors of
    the humanities, including the scholar of Semitic languages you dismiss
    below.

    The needs of the Semitic community must be taken into account, but so
    must the needs of others. It is preposterous to say that the needs of
    these scholars to have a single encoding outweighs the needs of others
    to have separate ones, since the scholars in question demonstrably do
    NOT need a single encoding: they've been managing okay without one for
    quite some time. Would it be nice if they didn't have to manage in that
    way? Perhaps, but not so nice as to deny other people their
    *legitimate* needs (how do I know it isn't that nice? Just because
    things have been working okay so far without a unique encoding, and
    there will not be a unique encoding in use by Semitic scholars for a
    *long* time, whether or not Phoenician is ever encoded).

    Please stop pretending that the scholarly world outside the Semiticist
    community is inconsequential in this regard, and that the needs of the
    Semiticist community are being ignored. They are also being considered,
    as they must be.

    ~mark

    Peter Kirk wrote:

    > I note that the revised version of Michael Everson's Phoenician
    > proposal (dated 29 May) has now been posted in place of the original
    > at http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2746.pdf and
    > http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2746. This has corrected the
    > error in the answer to question C2a. It now lists at C2b five users of
    > the script with whom Michael has had contact, although only one of
    > these (Jo Ann Hackett) is a scholar of Semitic languages. There is no
    > mention now of proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite.
    >
    > The link from http://evertype.com/formal.html remains broken.
    >



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