From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Jul 07 2005 - 13:30:15 CDT
Peter Constable wrote:
>>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.
That's not a fair comparison Peter, because there was never a one-to-one correspondence
between Arabic and Latin letters, called by the same name in a multitude of languages. The
view that the old Canaanite writing system and Hebrew are a merely visually distinct forms
of the same script is a perfectly valid view. But there are other views -- and other
*needs* -- that are also valid, and we can encode 'Phoenician' on the basis of those other
views and needs without needing to deny the perfectly valid view of the semitic script
continuum held by many semiticists.
[Note that I am only saying anything at all about Phoenician because a) someone else
brought it up, and b) after some months of quiet and reflection I think I can say
something that stresses the validity of both sides in the recent debates. If Sarasvati
would prefer me to shut up about it altogether, I will.]
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was War (revised edition), by Gwynne Dyer God's secret agents, by Alice Hogge
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