Re: Old Hebrew, extra Uniscribe work (Re: Arabic encoding model (alas, static!))

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Jul 07 2005 - 12:12:45 CDT

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    On 07/07/2005 17:08, Peter Constable wrote:

    >>From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
    >>
    >>
    >On Behalf
    >
    >
    >>Of asadek@st-elias.com
    >>
    >>
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >>NO : it means they must behave the same way and that in this case
    >>as Phoenician and Old Hebrew are linguistically sometimes unseparable
    >>and Old Hebrew is even written written in Phoenician that this is
    >>
    >>
    >useless.
    >
    >The fact that old Turkish is written in Arabic while recent Turkish is
    >written in Latin has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Arabic and
    >Latin should be encoded with the same or different characters.
    >
    >
    >
    This is a false analogy. The change in Turkish from Arabic to Latin
    script was a deliberate and discontinuous change from one script to
    another, and also not a one-to-one mapping. The change in Hebrew from
    old or palaeo-Hebrew (similar to Phoenician) to "square" Hebrew (similar
    to the Unicode Hebrew reference glyphs) was a matter of gradual
    evolution from one style of handwriting to another. It was also a
    one-to-one change, although at a later stage distinct final forms of
    some letters evolved (and later still vowel points were added). The
    situation is much more closely analogous to the Fraktur style of Latin
    script, which differs from regular (reference glyph) styles in letter
    shapes and also in final form etc rules; or like the difference between
    modern cursive Hebrew and square Hebrew. And Unicode has judged Fraktur
    as not sufficiently different from regular Latin for separate encoding
    (except for special mathematical purposes), and similarly for modern
    cursive Hebrew.

    Michael Everson rejected the proposition which he inferred that "we
    shouldn't work to encode scripts used by scholars". But this leave open
    the question of whether scholars actually use any particular script, as
    a distinct script rather than as a set of glyph variants. After all, the
    primary justification given for a certain proposed script was not its
    scholarly use, but its use in popular accounts of the history of the
    alphabet.

    Meanwhile it surprises me that Uniscribe does not already recognise code
    points 00010800-00010FFF as RTL characters, as these have long been
    reserved in the Roadmap for RTL scripts. If this had been done at an
    appropriate time, there would be no need for repeated changes to
    Uniscribe to support each of the 22 individual RTL scripts roadmapped
    for this block.

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