Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On Friday, May 21, 2004 3:01 PM, John Hudson wrote: Let me rephrase the point as a question: What in the encoding of 'Phoenician' characters in Unicode obliges anyone to use those characters for ancient Canaanite texts? An analogous statement can be made of any script in Unicode. We can all continue to use code pages or the myriad Hebrew fonts that put the glyphs at Latin-0 code points. If the proposed Phoenician block can be so easily ignored in encoding ancient Canaanite texts, then is the block really needed? Frankly, though, all statements to the effect of well, they have no complaint because they can just ignore the Phoenician block and continue to do whatever they've been doing sound less than sincere when they come from Unicode boosters. (You aren't the only one who has put this argument forth.) In your 5/20 message, you say: There is no reason at all why Semiticists cannot simply totally ignore the proposed Phoenician block. But then you say: I think it is you who is being disingenuous, because I never suggested that users should ignore Unicode altogether or that they should develop their own standard, or any of the other things you suggest follow in some way from my observation that there is no reason why semiticists should not ignore the Phoenician block. What was insincere about my posting? Forgive me, but it seemed to me that when you claim that Semiticists will be able to ignore the Phoenician block, there is an implication that they will use something else. I never said that they would have to ignore Unicode altogether, but they will have to develop their own standards (agreements, if you prefer) for what that something else will be. What aspect of 'Unicode support implemented in commercial software' would semiticists and other users have to ignore in order e.g. to encode Palaeo-Hebrew texts using the Hebrew block? None. This frames the discussion in a way that ignores the coercive power of Unicode in the marketplace. One could, with only a little imagination, foresee that there will be software packages that will only display Palaeo-Hebrew fonts for text encoded in the 'Phoenician' block; that will not match texts that need to match; etc. Semiticists would have to ignore all the (future) software capabilities available to them if only they would cave in and start using the Phoenician block. Moreover, if anyone wanted to use Phoenician in some future http protocol, Unicode conformance is required (at least so says the standard). I happen to think that the Phoenician encoding is unnecessary, but the sky isn't going to fall if it gets accepted I agree with this. ...Now, it happens that there are apparently some people who claim to have a plain-text *need* to distinguish Phoenician from Hebrew, i.e. someone disagrees that it is unnecessary. As far as I'm concerned, this is the only basis on which the Michael's proposal should be accepted or rejected, which means that those who oppose the encoding would better spend their time querying that need directly to the people who have expressed it than making silly, repetetive arguments about fraktur on this list. It would be nice to know who they were. I did ask for an elaboration of the need in an earlier posting. The only person I know who has stated a direct need is Bob Richmond, and that was from the position of a software developer serving a user base that seems to have no use for Hebrew. More recently, Peter Constable, on 5/26, posted a series of technical arguments in favor of a separate script. They made quite a bit of sense, as do Peter Kirk's rebuttals of 5/27. And this is the first (and possibly last) sentence I've written that uses the word fraktur. :-) Ted Ted Hopp, Ph.D. ZigZag, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-301-990-7453 newSLATE is your personal learning workspace ...on the web at http://www.newSLATE.com/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Ted Hopp wrote: On Friday, May 21, 2004 3:01 PM, John Hudson wrote: Let me rephrase the point as a question: What in the encoding of 'Phoenician' characters in Unicode obliges anyone to use those characters for ancient Canaanite texts? An analogous statement can be made of any script in Unicode. We can all continue to use code pages or the myriad Hebrew fonts that put the glyphs at Latin-0 code points. If the proposed Phoenician block can be so easily ignored in encoding ancient Canaanite texts, then is the block really needed? A Phoenician block is obviously not needed by those who wish to represent Phoenician / ancient Canaanite texts with Hebrew Characters. It is only needed by those who wish to represent Phoenician text with Phoenician characters and Hebrew text with Hebrew characters. - Chris
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Ted Hopp wrote: Let me rephrase the point as a question: What in the encoding of 'Phoenician' characters in Unicode obliges anyone to use those characters for ancient Canaanite texts? An analogous statement can be made of any script in Unicode. We can all continue to use code pages or the myriad Hebrew fonts that put the glyphs at Latin-0 code points. If the proposed Phoenician block can be so easily ignored in encoding ancient Canaanite texts, then is the block really needed? Ironic to find myself arguing the other side of this debate, having been broadly sympathetic to the semiticist objections to the proposal, but here goes... Note that I was not ever suggesting using myriad codepages, font hacks or other methods to encode ancient Canaanite texts. My point was that *within Unicode* one would have an option whether to encode these texts using the Hebrew characters or 'Phoenician' characters. The option, of course, may be a source of confusion, as choices often are. But my point is that no one is forced to choose one or the other. There are people who do not want to distinguish the encoding of ancient Canaanite from square Aramaic. But there are also people who do want to distinguish them. Both groups of people include respected scholars and experts in their fields. Somehow (how?) forcing the former group of people to use Phoenician characters for their texts would make them unhappy. Not separately encoding 'Phoenician' characters, so that there was no way to distinguish in plain text, would make the latter group of people unhappy. What was insincere about my posting? Forgive me, but it seemed to me that when you claim that Semiticists will be able to ignore the Phoenician block, there is an implication that they will use something else. I never said that they would have to ignore Unicode altogether, but they will have to develop their own standards (agreements, if you prefer) for what that something else will be. But the whole basis of the discussion to that point had been that some semiticists wanted to use the existing Hebrew block. The 'something else' is Hebrew, already encoded in Unicode and supported my much existing software. As far as I could tell, no one was suggesting developing some 'new standard'. This frames the discussion in a way that ignores the coercive power of Unicode in the marketplace. One could, with only a little imagination, foresee that there will be software packages that will only display Palaeo-Hebrew fonts for text encoded in the 'Phoenician' block... This frames the discussion in a way that ignores basic concepts of font and software interaction. A software package has no way of knowing whether the glyph encoded at U+05D4 is Aramaic square script, stam, rashi, modern cursive or palaeo-Hebrew. If your *text* is encoded using Hebrew characters, you can display it in any font that supports those characters, regardless of the glyph shape mapped to those characters in the font. If your text is encoded using Phoenician characters, the same applies: any font that supports those characters can be used. Moreover, if anyone wanted to use Phoenician in some future http protocol, Unicode conformance is required (at least so says the standard). What does that have to do with how semiticists decide to encode *texts*? If you want to encode Palaeo-Hebrew texts using Hebrew characters, you are going to have a Hebrew document. Phoenician is only relevant at all if you decide to use Phoenician characters and produce a Phoenician document. This is what I mean when I say there is no reason not to ignore the Phoenician characters if they do not suit your purpose. Now, all that said, I still remain concerned that the people who want to distinguish 'Phoenician' from Aramaic square script and other Hebrew script styles in plain text have not thought through the larger implications of encoding 'significant' nodes from a script continuum. Encoding a single 'Ancient Near-Eastern 22-letter Alphabet', whether you're one of the people who wants to use it or now, doesn't strike me as a significant problem. Encoding half a dozen of these 'nodes' might be, because with each additional structurally identical script the number of choices and likely confusion increase. John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On 02/06/2004 13:48, Christopher Fynn wrote: ... An analogous statement can be made of any script in Unicode. We can all continue to use code pages or the myriad Hebrew fonts that put the glyphs at Latin-0 code points. If the proposed Phoenician block can be so easily ignored in encoding ancient Canaanite texts, then is the block really needed? A Phoenician block is obviously not needed by those who wish to represent Phoenician / ancient Canaanite texts with Hebrew Characters. It is only needed by those who wish to represent Phoenician text with Phoenician characters and Hebrew text with Hebrew characters. - Chris The fallacy in this argument is that there is a difference between a wish and a need. Some people have said that they wish to represent Phoenician separately, just as other people have said that they wish to represent Klingon or Japanese separately, but they have not demonstrated a need to do so. Peter C's latter scenario, the journal editor, comes close to demonstrating this, but it does not come (explicitly) from an actual user. Chris, you need to refer to that scenario or something similar if you want your argument to be at all convincing. -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On Tuesday, May 25, 2004 10:23 AM, Peter Constable wrote: In fact Jews used both diascripts, Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew, contemporaneously. Could you please provide more information on this? Is this referring to the DSS including both, or did the common man on the street use both? (There may have been paleographers in the first century BC as there are today. That shouldn't be construed as unqualified contemporaneous use.) This might be relevant: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1308letter=A Ted Hopp Ted Hopp, Ph.D. ZigZag, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-301-990-7453 newSLATE is your personal learning workspace ...on the web at http://www.newSLATE.com/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Constable wrote: So, the question is whether contemporaneous use within a single community suggests that they were viewed as the same or distinct. Either is possible. If they were considered font variants, then you might expect to see different documents using one or the other, or see different elements within a single document using one or the other. But if you see documents containing equivalent content repeated in each, then that might well suggest they were viewed as distinct. The examples brought by Dean Snyder from ancient Judah seem to be either different documents using one or the other (for a loose definition of documents) or different elements (the Tetragrammaton, scribal redactions) within a single document using one or the other. The examples from modern coins vary. The 10-shekel at http://www.bankisrael.gov.il/catal/c41.gif has equivalent content repeated in each, but the 1 shekel at http://www.bankisrael.gov.il/catal/c39.gif does not.However, I discovered when using a shekel coin to do my own survey of the legibility of PH in modern Israel that most people simply assume that it does: almost everyone who thought that the PH was writing at all thought that it said Shekel. So if Peter's premise is correct, and it seems reasonable to me, the limited evidence seems to suggest that Palaeo-Hebrew and Square Hebrew were viewed as font variants by Hebrew speakers 2,000 years ago, and as separate scripts by Hebrew speakers today.
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Dean Snyder wrote, Modern Hebrew without the adjunct notational systems is Jewish Hebrew and DID exist while the Phoenicians were still around in the first few centuries BC. In fact Jews used both diascripts, Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew, contemporaneously. Of course, you're right about the age of modern Hebrew overlapping the age of Phoenician a bit. The wording in my post, to say the least, was infelicitous. I should probably have just asked: Did the ancient Phoenicians write Phoenician in modern Hebrew? Obviously Palaeo-Hebrew is a modern term; the concept is however a very old one - just look at the Dead Sea scrolls, turn-of-the-era Jewish coins, etc., where it is employed in an archaizing way. My pocket change is depressingly modern. Some coins from the Phoenician region apparently have Phoenician numerals and Hebrew legends suggesting that these coins weren't issued by the Phoenicians. I couldn't find any references to coins bearing both Hebrew and palaeo-Hebrew legends, but wouldn't be surprised if they exist. (Numismatist's plain text database of coin legends, anyone?) The Greeks issued coins with Greek legends and Phoenician numerals during the reign of Alexander the Great, but moved to using Greek for the dates, too. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Old_World_Archaeology_and_Art/html/epublications/papers/alexander_coinage/alexander.html If palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew are the same script, then it couldn't be said that the Jews abandoned the palaeo-Hebrew script after the exile. Yet, this is what available references say did happen. (By available, I mean to me. Additional citations would be welcome.) Negative proofs are kind of hard. I've been unable to find anything which states that the ancient Jews considered Phoenician and Hebrew to be the same script. If it were easily found, I'd've found it already. In fairness, I've also tried to find anything documenting that the ancient Jews specifically considered Phoenician and Hebrew to be separate scripts. Maybe it was such a no-brainer (either way) for them that they never recorded their thoughts on the subject. Or, maybe nothing survived. Or, maybe nothing's been brought to light yet. Or, maybe somebody knows better? Religious scribes had very strict rules. The Word was supposed to be copied *very* faithfully. Yet, older DSS appear seem to have been in palaeo- and newer DSS in Hebrew. Did the scribes think they were faithfully copying older scrolls when they abandoned palaeo-Hebrew script and made newer scrolls in Hebrew? Did they make the newer scrolls because they'd abandoned the older script and no-one other than scholars could *read* the older scrolls? Did the very strict rules begin some time after the older script was abandoned? Does anyone know? Best regards, James Kass
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
James Kass wrote: Obviously Palaeo-Hebrew is a modern term; the concept is however a very old one - just look at the Dead Sea scrolls, turn-of-the-era Jewish coins, etc., where it is employed in an archaizing way. My pocket change is depressingly modern. That needn't be an obstacle to the argument going full circle yet again. Hebrew and Palaeo-Hebrew letters occur side-by-side on some modern Israeli coins also. See the photography near the bottom of this Typophile discussion: http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/4101/27209.html John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
John Hudson wrote, That needn't be an obstacle to the argument going full circle yet again. Hebrew and Palaeo-Hebrew letters occur side-by-side on some modern Israeli coins also. See the photography near the bottom of this Typophile discussion: The bimetallic issue shown in the on-line graphic seems to be newer than the 1985 Krause that was handy here, but, as you say, there are other examples. Like the 5 lirot piece from 5723 (1963 CE) made of coin silver. It commemorates seafaring and appears to have an ancient Phoenician ship on the face of the coin which bears the Phoenician inscription. (Or, it might be an ancient Greek ship, since Greeks are better sailors.) (Krause catalogue doesn't cover ancients. Never thought to look for moderns.) What could possibly be an obstacle to arguing full circle one more time? Self restraint? Did anyone not like my use of the word Phoenician in the paragraph above? Then, please allow me to rephrase: It commemorates seafaring and appears to have an ancient Palaeo-Hebrew ship on the face of the coin which bears the Palaeo-Hebrew inscription. Should we do The Thread From Gehenna's equivalent of Monty Python's Argument Clinic skit again? Supporter: I need to store Phoenician script and Hebrew script in a plain text database using separate script identity in order to complete a numismatic database of modern Hebrew coin legends. Opposer: No, you don't. Supporter: Yes, I do! Except somebody would probably come up with some kind of German coin that had Fraktur and Roman mixed inscription. And then someone else would say that the Fraktur/Roman inscription wasn't germane because ... and so on. Self restraint is starting to sound pretty good. Best regards, James Kass
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
James Kass wrote at 7:57 AM on Wednesday, May 26, 2004: If palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew are the same script, then it couldn't be said that the Jews abandoned the palaeo-Hebrew script after the exile. Yet, this is what available references say did happen. (By available, I mean to me. Additional citations would be welcome.) The word script is not used in most palaeographical literature (in fact, in none that I can think of) in the same way it is used in encoding contexts. Palaeographers, as also almost all non-encoders, use the word script very loosely to encompass both minor variations in palaeography and major ones. Here's a modern example for, yes, Fraktur ;-) Unter den Nazis wurde die Verwendung der Schriften politisiert. Zunächst wurde die Fraktur als deutsche Schrift gegenüber der nichtarischen Antiqua bevorzugt. http://www.net-lexikon.de/Frakturschrift.html Such employment of the term script should not be used in making encoding decisions. [It's very hard not to use the word script in its non-technical sense in palaeographical discussions - it can become tedious to keep using words like hand, diascript, etc., or keep quoting script. And so, I too use script often myself in a non-encoding sense, trusting the context will make the intended meaning clear.] Negative proofs are kind of hard. I've been unable to find anything which states that the ancient Jews considered Phoenician and Hebrew to be the same script. If it were easily found, I'd've found it already. In fairness, I've also tried to find anything documenting that the ancient Jews specifically considered Phoenician and Hebrew to be separate scripts. Maybe it was such a no-brainer (either way) for them that they never recorded their thoughts on the subject. Or, maybe nothing survived. Or, maybe nothing's been brought to light yet. Or, maybe somebody knows better? The evidence for this of which I am aware includes the contemporaneous use of both diascripts in ancient Judah, some of which evidence I have mentioned in previous emails (See, in particular, the one in response to Peter Constable at 3:06 pm yesterday.) In addition, I might add the continued use of Palaeo-Hebrew by the dialectically close Samaritan neighbors of the Jews to write their Bible and their literature, even to this day. The neighboring Jews also wrote manuscripts, coins, inscriptions, and jar labels in the same Palaeo- Hebrew script used by the Samaritans. Also, not apropos to ancient Jews, but ... someone mentioned much earlier in these threads even seeing a business sign in modern Israel that is written in Palaeo-Hebrew. Religious scribes had very strict rules. The Word was supposed to be copied *very* faithfully. Yet, older DSS appear seem to have been in palaeo- and newer DSS in Hebrew. Did the scribes think they were faithfully copying older scrolls when they abandoned palaeo-Hebrew script and made newer scrolls in Hebrew? Absolutely. Did they make the newer scrolls because they'd abandoned the older script and no-one other than scholars could *read* the older scrolls? Did the very strict rules begin some time after the older script was abandoned? Does anyone know? The reasons given for the switch from Palaeo-Hebrew to Jewish Hebrew are manifold and sometimes controversial. For certain we know that: 1) Jews exiled in Babylonia adopted both the Aramaic language and Aramaic script, the lingua et scriptio franca of the Babylonian empire. (This adopted Aramaic script, also an offshoot of the Canaanite script closely related to Palaeo-Hebrew, is now known as Jewish Hebrew script. See my earlier attachment, Selected West Semitic Scripts, to get some idea how close these diascripts are.) 2) Even major portions of some of the later books of the Jewish Bible, Daniel and Ezra, were authored, not in Hebrew, but in Aramaic, and presumably using the Aramaic script. (The earliest few extant manuscripts of these texts, dated to a few hundred years after their authorship, employ the same Jewish Hebrew script for both the Hebrew and Aramaic portions of the texts.) 3) After the exile, Jews began an official program of translating or paraphrasing their entire Bible into Aramaic, the Targums, still using the Jewish Hebrew script. 3) There are Dead Sea biblical scrolls written in both Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew. For what it's worth, I believe the newer script became dominant primarily based on the example and influence of Daniel and Ezra, portions of whose works in the Bible are written in Aramaic language and, presumably, script. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
James Kass wrote at 11:01 AM on Wednesday, May 26, 2004: And then someone else would say that the Fraktur/Roman inscription wasn't germane because ... Or even German ;-) Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dean Snyder Negative proofs are kind of hard. I've been unable to find anything which states that the ancient Jews considered Phoenician and Hebrew to be the same script. If it were easily found, I'd've found it already. In fairness, I've also tried to find anything documenting that the ancient Jews specifically considered Phoenician and Hebrew to be separate scripts. Maybe it was such a no-brainer (either way) for them that they never recorded their thoughts on the subject. Or, maybe nothing survived. Or, maybe nothing's been brought to light yet. Or, maybe somebody knows better? The evidence for this of which I am aware includes the contemporaneous use of both diascripts in ancient Judah So, the question is whether contemporaneous use within a single community suggests that they were viewed as the same or distinct. Either is possible. If they were considered font variants, then you might expect to see different documents using one or the other, or see different elements within a single document using one or the other. But if you see documents containing equivalent content repeated in each, then that might well suggest they were viewed as distinct. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On 26/05/2004 13:13, Peter Constable wrote: ... So, the question is whether contemporaneous use within a single community suggests that they were viewed as the same or distinct. Either is possible. If they were considered font variants, then you might expect to see different documents using one or the other, or see different elements within a single document using one or the other. But if you see documents containing equivalent content repeated in each, then that might well suggest they were viewed as distinct. My experience of living for seven years in a country undergoing a gradual script transition might be relevant here. In Azerbaijan the official script was changed from Cyrillic to Latin in 1991. But, before stricter laws were introduced around 2001 that all publications must be in Latin script, the majority of publications were in Cyrillic, except for those targetted at children who were learning Latin script at school. It was also common at one time to see newspapers with headlines in Latin and text in Cyrillic, and books with titles in Latin and text in Cyrillic. This was done because the publishers wanted to appear to support Latin script but also knew that most of their target audience was more comfortable reading Cyrillic. Some documents were published separately in both scripts, presumably so that they could be easily accessible to both adults and children. Not much here which could not have taken place in Germany after the official abolition of Fraktur. Sorry, we are supposed to have moved away from that argument. It is hard to say whether the two scripts were and are considered glyph variants or separate scripts. Probably more the latter (which is of course the Unicode view). But it was well recognised that the two scripts could be mapped on to one another one to one. And this was made use of in a number of legacy fonts using different encodings, Latin at Cyrillic code points and vice versa. It is also recognised that for several letters, at least as capitals, there is no distinction between the two forms. Indeed I have even seen a written word YEMKXAHA cafe, canteen which shifts from Cyrillic to Latin script in the middle of the word; all of the glyphs in this word are valid in both Latin and Cyrillic, but Y and H have different meanings in the two scripts, and in this word Y must be Latin and H must be Cyrillic. -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
on 2004-05-25 12:06 Dean Snyder wrote: 3) Palaeo-Hebrew scribal redactions to Jewish Hebrew manuscripts To me, this is a convincing reason to encode palaeo-Hebrew separately: it would allow such manuscripts to be encoded in plain text. -- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
John Jenkins jenkins at apple dot com wrote: That's handwriting, Patrick. Come on, you know better. I can't read my doctor's handwriting either, but it's unified with Latin. Are you *sure*? Maybe that's why you can't read it... :-) Come to think of it, that might explain some things... -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Mark E. Shoulson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Yeah, I've wondered about this. I've said it before: if you put my back to the wall, I really don't think I could defend the disunification of U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A and U+0410 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A. But that's why they don't put me on the UTC. The simplest answer is source seperation. Moreover, there have been at least a dozen Cyrillic character sets, and to the best of my knowledge, every one of them disunified Latin and Cyrillic, including the most commonly used ones, so the desires of the people who write Russian is clear. The decision on how to encode Cyrillic was made before Unicode was even a dream, and Unicode had no option but to follow. -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
From: Doug Ewell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Patrick Andries Patrick dot Andries at xcential dot com wrote: Try with Stterlin also unified within Latin ;-) That's handwriting, Patrick. Come on, you know better. I can't read my doctor's handwriting either, but it's unified with Latin. I disagree, this is not only handwriting: Stterlin exists also as a regular font. It's just that it uses a cursive (connected) style where letters are normally not separated by some blank. But I have seen Stterlin printed with small blank separation between glyphs, to facilitate its reading. I'm quite sure you can find books or documents printed with such font style. Handwriting is characterized by irregular glyphs for the same letters, whose form highly depends on the surrounding context and the movement of hand on paper, or on the current mood of the writer, or on the type of pen or plum used to draw it, or on the type of surface and ink, or by the intended recipient of the written text.
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On 24/05/2004 10:19, Michael Everson wrote: At 08:41 -0700 2004-05-24, Peter Kirk wrote: But if it had been defined and your small group had started to publish widely with it, it would have made things more difficult for those who preferred Klingon in Latin script. For example, they would have to do double searches of the archives of Klingon publications for the articles they wanted. That is your unproved assertion, and ignores the fact that your precious databases and archives already include multiscript representation of the languages you study. This insistance that your work will be damaged by the presence of Phoenician code positions is as untenable as it was when you first made it. I have not ignored the fact that there are already multiple representations. I have clearly stated that a major goal of Unicode is to move away from such multiple representations, and that the encoding of Phoenician should be chosen so as to facilitate that goal (if that's the correct jargon). I have listened to the three, or mostly to one of the three (and a few people like you who support him but are not users) patiently and repeatedly for the last month or more. All I have heard are the same unconvincing arguments and appeals to his own authority. I see the apology is rescinded too, and it is back to ad-hominem. The apology is not rescinded. This is not ad hominem. I have heard unconvincing arguments from two or three people. Am I not permitted to mention that one of those people has appealed to his own authority as an acknowledged expert on writing systems in general? I do not question that authority and expertise, I just ask for it to be backed up by convincing arguments. Sorry for being repetitive, but I'm certainly not the only one, on either side of this discussion. There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions Which was rejected by Ken for good technical reasons. I don't remember any technical reasons, it was more a matter of we haven't done it this way before. But perhaps that is only because the need to do this has not previously been identified. However, I can make a good case for the new Coptic letters being made compatibility equivalent to Greek - which can still be done, presumably - as well as for similar equivalences for scripts like Gothic and Old Italic, and perhaps Indic scripts - which presumably cannot now be added for stability reasons. and with interleaved collation, Which was rejected for the default template (and would go against the practices already in place in the default template) but is available to you in your tailorings. Again, a matter of we haven't done it this way before. also encoding as variation sequences, Which was rejected by Ken and others for good technical reasons, not the least of which was the p%r%e%p%o%s%t%e%r%o%u%s%n%e%s%s% of interleaving Hebrew text in order to get Phoenician glyphs. I don't like this one myself either. But I disagree on *preposterousness*. You consider this preposterous because you presuppose that these are entirely different scripts. Others consider it preposterous *not* to interleave Phoenician and Hebrew because they understand these to be glyph variants of the same script. For, as John Hudson has put it so clearly, for these people Phoenician and Hebrew letters are the same abstract characters, in different representations. You wrote elsewhere of A strong tradition of scholarship which does not consider all of these numerous and visually-varied 22-letter Semitic writing systems to be abstract glyph variants of a single underlying structure. I accept that there is such a tradition. But there is also A strong tradition of scholarship, that of most Semiticists, which has precisely the opposite view. We all need to recognise that there is this genuine scholarly disagreement, and avoid emotive words like preposterousness, and all the more p%r%e%p%o%s%t%e%r%o%u%s%n%e%s%s%. And since neither side can claim a clear majority, we need to look for a mediating position which is reasonably acceptable to both sides. Three suggestions for this have been put forward. The main objection to two of them seems to be that they are novel. But novel problems need novel solutions. but the only response I get amounts to No, because Phoenician is a separate script, because I say so and this is the right thing to do. It is a pity that the facts are not obvious to you. It is clear that you don't want Phoenician to be a separate script, and you grasp at straws trying to make an encoded Phoenician into Hebrew. It is clear to me that Phoenician is *not* an entirely separate script. It seems to me that it comes somewhere between being the same script and being a separate one. (In other words, I don't entirely accept either of the strong traditions of scholarship.)
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Shemayah Phillips has kindly given permission to forward this response to a question about Hebrew range palaeo- fonting along to our public list. Best regards, James Kass - Original Message - From: Shemayah Phillips [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: James Kass [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 7:21 PM Subject: Re: Palaeo-Hebrew, Phoenician, and Unicode (Phoenician Unicode proposal) Shalom James, I have a number of Hebrew fonts or transliteration fonts. The first ones were assigned to the same keys as some fonts I used in the old MegaWriter (ChiWriter) program. I was a means of using Hebrew, Palaeo, and transliteration on our website beginning in 1996. But I assume you are talking about a Palaeo font which used the standard Hebrew keyboard assignments. I'll be honest and tell you that I am not up to speed on unicode. The reason for doing this was a project among us and the Karaites. They asked me to do this in order that they could use a Hebrew encoded Tanak text which would be available online, and readable in Internet Explorer. So I am thinking this is your second scenario. I have no problem with a reassignment of my palaeo in order to accommodate as many Hebrew glyphs as possible. In the Internet Explorer situation above it was possible to display either Palaeo or Asshuri (square script) depending on what the html asked for because of the I was asked to assign the font characters. The design of the characters was my attempt to capture the most typical and classical forms after comparing a number of references. I have seen a number of fonts since then which appear to me to atypical or just importation of scanned examples from particular inscriptions, and a wide variety of fonts from inscriptions. As a teacher (former at this point), I used this font design also to show the similarities and history of our Graeco-Latin characters' in Canaanite/Punic/Palaeo characters, and so strokes needed to be clear and representative to younger students but realistic as well. rather lively discussion? That sounds interesting. Are you interested in the design of the characters for the standard? If so, as long as they publically available to all, I would be receptive concerning their use. I would like acknowledgement for the design/rendering of the glyphs. You can forward my reply if it is of interest. Shemayah James Kass wrote: Greetings, There is currently a proposal to include the ancient Phoenician script in Unicode/ISO. Are you in contact with anyone who cares to express an opinion on the merits of the proposal? It is available on-line in PDF format at: http://wwwold.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2746 Also, a question has come up in the rather lively discussion of this topic on the Unicode public list about a Palaeo Hebrew font offered on the Ebionite web pages. It seems that the font uses Palaeo Hebrew glyphs in conjunction with the Hebrew range of code points in Unicode. We wonder if the reason for this is because your community considers the ancient Palaeo Hebrew writings to be the same script as, or only a stylistic variant of, the square-style modern Hebrew letters... -or- ...is the reason behind this because using the modern Hebrew range to display Palaeo Hebrew guarantees that the layout of the text will be right-to-left as expected and, in the absence of a Unicode range for Phoenician/Palaeo-Hebrew, using the Hebrew range seems to be the best choice? I am hoping that you are Shemayah ben-Avraham, who created the fonts, and that you can help us by sharing your understanding of this important writing system. If you choose to reply, may I forward your reply to the Unicode public list? (This is a list open to the public for the purpose of discussing matters relating to Unicode and is hosted by The Unicode Consortium. Please see this link... http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html ...for more information about the Unicode public list.) With best regards, James Kass
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
James Kass wrote at 5:12 PM on Monday, May 24, 2004: Peter Kirk writes, Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said yes because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. Of course, they'd have said no because modern Hebrew didn't exist in their time. So, they'd not even know what modern Hebrew was. The script used in their time for Hebrew wasn't very similar to their own script; it *was* their own script. Modern Hebrew without the adjunct notational systems is Jewish Hebrew and DID exist while the Phoenicians were still around in the first few centuries BC. In fact Jews used both diascripts, Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew, contemporaneously. Palaeo-Hebrew is a modern term and a modern concept. Obviously Palaeo-Hebrew is a modern term; the concept is however a very old one - just look at the Dead Sea scrolls, turn-of-the-era Jewish coins, etc., where it is employed in an archaizing way. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
Michael Everson wrote at 2:58 PM on Monday, May 24, 2004: In any case we're encoding the significant nodes in your *diascript. Similarly, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are distinguished, as are the Romance languages. Are you saying that Swedish, Danish, and the Romance languages are not unified in Unicode? Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
At 09:06 -0400 2004-05-25, Dean Snyder wrote: Michael Everson wrote at 2:58 PM on Monday, May 24, 2004: In any case we're encoding the significant nodes in your *diascript. Similarly, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are distinguished, as are the Romance languages. Are you saying that Swedish, Danish, and the Romance languages are not unified in Unicode? Are you being deliberately obtuse? -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
Michael Everson wrote at 2:45 PM on Tuesday, May 25, 2004: At 09:06 -0400 2004-05-25, Dean Snyder wrote: Michael Everson wrote at 2:58 PM on Monday, May 24, 2004: In any case we're encoding the significant nodes in your *diascript. Similarly, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are distinguished, as are the Romance languages. Are you saying that Swedish, Danish, and the Romance languages are not unified in Unicode? Are you being deliberately obtuse? No. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dean Snyder In fact Jews used both diascripts, Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew, contemporaneously. Could you please provide more information on this? Is this referring to the DSS including both, or did the common man on the street use both? (There may have been paleographers in the first century BC as there are today. That shouldn't be construed as unqualified contemporaneous use.) Peter Constable
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
At 10:12 -0400 2004-05-25, Dean Snyder wrote: In any case we're encoding the significant nodes in your *diascript. Similarly, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are distinguished, as are the Romance languages. Are you saying that Swedish, Danish, and the Romance languages are not unified in Unicode? Are you being deliberately obtuse? No. Then go back and re-read the entire context because you have got it wrong. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
Michael Everson wrote at 4:01 PM on Tuesday, May 25, 2004: At 10:12 -0400 2004-05-25, Dean Snyder wrote: Michael Everson In any case we're encoding the significant nodes in your *diascript. Similarly, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are distinguished, as are the Romance languages. Are you saying that Swedish, Danish, and the Romance languages are not unified in Unicode? Are you being deliberately obtuse? No. Then go back and re-read the entire context because you have got it wrong. I have already read it and it sounds like you're saying Romance and Scandinavian are not unified in Unicode, or as you put it Similarly [they] are distinguished. (And the context is about significant nodes on a script continuum that should or should not be distinguished in separate encodings.) If I am misunderstanding you, could you please make it clearer what you intend? Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
You posit that there is a 22-letter Semitic script and that we should not encode any of its *diascripts. You suggest that *diascript is to script as dialect is to language. It is arguable that Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are dialects of the same mutually intelligible Scandinavian language. Yet they each have their own formal orthographies and are, in a sense encoded. In the same way, even if Phoenician and Hebrew are *diascripts of an underlying 22-letter Semitic script, that doesn't mean that they should not be encoded. Pauses. Thinks. I think this argument is at an end. I am tired of false analogies and fake challenges. Separate encoding of Phoenician will not ruin Unicode forever for Semitic studies. Not one of the claims made by any of you to the contrary have any merit. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
Michael Everson wrote at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, May 25, 2004: It is arguable that Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are dialects of the same mutually intelligible Scandinavian language. Yet they each have their own formal orthographies and are, in a sense encoded. In the same way, even if Phoenician and Hebrew are *diascripts of an underlying 22-letter Semitic script, that doesn't mean that they should not be encoded. To be analogous to the Phoenican/Hebrew situation, wouldn't Danish A have to be encoded separately from Swedish A. Maybe I'm wrong in being flabbergasted by this co-mingling of the concepts of orthographies and encodings as being somehow equivalent, but I'll let the Unicode experts clarify this. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Constable wrote at 7:23 AM on Tuesday, May 25, 2004: Dean Snyder In fact Jews used both diascripts, Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew, contemporaneously. Could you please provide more information on this? Is this referring to the DSS including both, or did the common man on the street use both? (There may have been paleographers in the first century BC as there are today. That shouldn't be construed as unqualified contemporaneous use.) The contemporary use of both Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew is witnessed by: 1) Entire Dead Sea manuscripts written in one or the other of the two diascripts 2) Palaeo-Hebrew Tetragrammatons embedded in Jewish Hebrew manuscripts 3) Palaeo-Hebrew scribal redactions to Jewish Hebrew manuscripts 4) Hasmonean era Jewish coins with Palaeo-Hebrew inscriptions 5) Palaeo-Hebrew date and content markers on wine jugs at Qumran Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter, There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions Which was rejected by Ken for good technical reasons. I don't remember any technical reasons, it was more a matter of we haven't done it this way before. The *reason* why we haven't done it this way before is because it would cause technical difficulties. Compatibility decompositions directly impact normalization. Cross-script equivalencing is done by transliteration algorithms, not by normalization algorithms. If you try to blur the boundary between those two by introducing compatibility decompositions to equate across separately encoded scripts, the net impact would be to screw up *both* normalization and transliteration by conflating the two. You would end up with confusion among both the implementers of such algorithms and the consumers of them. But perhaps that is only because the need to do this has not previously been identified. No, that is not the case. However, I can make a good case for the new Coptic letters being made compatibility equivalent to Greek - which can still be done, presumably - But will not be done. If you attempted to make your case, you would soon discover that even *if* such cross-script equivalencing via compatibility decompositions were a good idea (which it isn't), you would end up with inconsistencies, because some of the Coptic letters would have decompositions and some could not (because they are already in the standard without decompositions). You'd end up with a normalization nightmare (where some normalization forms would fold Coptic and Greek, and other normalization forms would not), while not having a transliteration solution. The UTC would, I predict, reject such a proposal out of hand. as well as for similar equivalences for scripts like Gothic and Old Italic, and perhaps Indic scripts - which presumably cannot now be added for stability reasons. Correct. and with interleaved collation, Which was rejected for the default template (and would go against the practices already in place in the default template) but is available to you in your tailorings. Again, a matter of we haven't done it this way before. I don't like the notion of interleaving in the default weighting table, and have spoken against it, but as John Cowan has pointed out, it is at least feasible. It doesn't have the ridiculousness factor of the compatibility decomposition approach. also encoding as variation sequences, Which was rejected by Ken and others for good technical reasons, not the least of which was the p%r%e%p%o%s%t%e%r%o%u%s%n%e%s%s% of interleaving Hebrew text in order to get Phoenician glyphs. I don't like this one myself either. So can we please just drop it? But I disagree on *preposterousness*. You consider this preposterous because you presuppose that these are entirely different scripts. Others consider it preposterous *not* to interleave Phoenician and Hebrew because they understand these to be glyph variants of the same script. For, as John Hudson has put it so clearly, for these people Phoenician and Hebrew letters are the same abstract characters, in different representations. This is just restating the basic disagreement, for the umpteenth time. It is clear to me that Phoenician is *not* an entirely separate script. It seems to me that it comes somewhere between being the same script and being a separate one. (In other words, I don't entirely accept either of the strong traditions of scholarship.) Therefore complete separation is inappropriate, although I don't insist on complete unification. O.k., so far, so good... So I am looking for a technical solution which comes somewhere between these two extremes, which officially recognises the one-to-one equivalence between Phoenician and (a subset of) Hebrew while making a plain text distinction possible for those who wish to make it. The technical solution for that is: A. Encode Phoenician as a separate script. (That accomplishes the second task, of making a plain text distinction possible.) B. Asserting in the *documentation* that there is a well-known one-to-one equivalence relationship between the letters of this (and other 22CWSA) and Hebrew letters -- including the publication of the mapping tables as proof of concept. People (up to and including OS manufacturers, if they so choose), can then make use of B in developing collation tables, search algorithms, transliterations, or other kinds of equivalencing. Where I get off, however, is in assuming that the recognition of an equivalence has to be *further* baked into some normative mechanism of the Unicode Standard itself. Attempting to force this into normative behavior via compatibility decompositions or variation sequences is likely to
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On 25/05/2004 12:14, Kenneth Whistler wrote: Peter, There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions Which was rejected by Ken for good technical reasons. I don't remember any technical reasons, it was more a matter of we haven't done it this way before. The *reason* why we haven't done it this way before is because it would cause technical difficulties. Compatibility decompositions directly impact normalization. Understood. I'm not convinced that that is a problem, but I don't insist on this. Cross-script equivalencing is done by transliteration algorithms, not by normalization algorithms. But you are begging the question by calling this cross-script. If you try to blur the boundary between those two by introducing compatibility decompositions to equate across separately encoded scripts, the net impact would be to screw up *both* normalization and transliteration by conflating the two. You would end up with confusion among both the implementers of such algorithms and the consumers of them. OK. But perhaps that is only because the need to do this has not previously been identified. No, that is not the case. However, I can make a good case for the new Coptic letters being made compatibility equivalent to Greek - which can still be done, presumably - But will not be done. If you attempted to make your case, you would soon discover that even *if* such cross-script equivalencing via compatibility decompositions were a good idea (which it isn't), you would end up with inconsistencies, because some of the Coptic letters would have decompositions and some could not (because they are already in the standard without decompositions). You'd end up with a normalization nightmare (where some normalization forms would fold Coptic and Greek, and other normalization forms would not), while not having a transliteration solution. Well, they would fold down to the current Unicode 4.0 situation, as the new Coptic letters would fold to the old ones, and the Coptic only letters in the old block will not be changed. This would have the great advantage that documents still being encoded with the still current Coptic encoding will remain compatibility equivalent to new documents. Of course it will confuse people who don't know the history, but there is plenty of that in Unicode already. The UTC would, I predict, reject such a proposal out of hand. as well as for similar equivalences for scripts like Gothic and Old Italic, and perhaps Indic scripts - which presumably cannot now be added for stability reasons. Correct. and with interleaved collation, Which was rejected for the default template (and would go against the practices already in place in the default template) but is available to you in your tailorings. Again, a matter of we haven't done it this way before. I don't like the notion of interleaving in the default weighting table, and have spoken against it, but as John Cowan has pointed out, it is at least feasible. It doesn't have the ridiculousness factor of the compatibility decomposition approach. Well, perhaps this is a way of finding an acceptable mediating position to put an end to the endless arguments in this thread. It may be a bit messy, like most compromises, but as it is feasible it is worthy of serious consideration. It should overcome the most serious objections of Semitic scholars etc to separate encoding of Phoenician - although I can't speak for everyone who has strong views on this subject. also encoding as variation sequences, Which was rejected by Ken and others for good technical reasons, not the least of which was the p%r%e%p%o%s%t%e%r%o%u%s%n%e%s%s% of interleaving Hebrew text in order to get Phoenician glyphs. I don't like this one myself either. So can we please just drop it? With pleasure. ... So I am looking for a technical solution which comes somewhere between these two extremes, which officially recognises the one-to-one equivalence between Phoenician and (a subset of) Hebrew while making a plain text distinction possible for those who wish to make it. The technical solution for that is: A. Encode Phoenician as a separate script. (That accomplishes the second task, of making a plain text distinction possible.) B. Asserting in the *documentation* that there is a well-known one-to-one equivalence relationship between the letters of this (and other 22CWSA) and Hebrew letters -- including the publication of the mapping tables as proof of concept. No, this doesn't go far enough, even for me so almost certainly not for others. This is accepting the splitters' case and throwing in a footnote in the hope of satisfying the joiners. I would think that the least that would be acceptable is default
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Kirk wrote: On 25/05/2004 12:14, Kenneth Whistler wrote: The technical solution for that is: A. Encode Phoenician as a separate script. (That accomplishes the second task, of making a plain text distinction possible.) B. Asserting in the *documentation* that there is a well-known one-to-one equivalence relationship between the letters of this (and other 22CWSA) and Hebrew letters -- including the publication of the mapping tables as proof of concept. No, this doesn't go far enough, even for me so almost certainly not for others. This is accepting the splitters' case and throwing in a footnote in the hope of satisfying the joiners. I would think that the least that would be acceptable is default interleaved collation. If you ask Ken the UTC nicely I should think a linguistic relationship between each letter and the corresponding Hebrew letter might be indicated in the name list immediately following the code chart (as is done with 0F9D - 094D). The relationship between the letters of the two scripts could probably also be explicitly stated in the block intro for this script (and maybe in the block intro for Hebrew as well). If the one to one correspondence is explicitly stated in the block intro this is a lot more than throwing in a footnote. Interleaved collation can be achieved by creating a tailored collation table - it is not necessary in the default collation, and *not* difficult to do this.. Similarly you could create a tailored table for folding. - Chris
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On 22/05/2004 16:49, James Kass wrote: Peter Kirk wrote, As I understand it, what at least a number of Semitic scholars want to do is not to transliterate, but to represent Phoenician texts with Phoenician letters with the Unicode Hebrew characters, and fonts with Phoenician glyphs at the Hebrew character code points. In other words, to treat the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician as a font change, like the difference between Fraktur and normal Latin script. Will they be allowed to do that after a Phoenician block is defined, or will they not? They'd simply use what's been called a transliteration font for this purpose. In order to effect the change, they'd probably have to click a button or two. Indeed, if they wanted to transliterate *and* trans-code, they'd have to click a button or two, too. In other words, the end-user's burden for either approach would be about the same, a couple of clicks. From a programming point of view, it's about as easy to re-map an existing font for masquerade/transliteration purposes as it is to write a character set conversion routine. Once again, for the end-user, the trouble involved should be about the same. In one case they install a font (font program), in the other case they install a character set conversion program. OK. And you agree that this is a proper thing to do, and that it should not be considered a cavalierly and antiquarian action, a throwback to the past century? ... (English is slippery. Whether the use of cavalierly above should be interpreted as 'like a gentleman' or 'with arrogance' would be a matter of opinion.) Ah, well, Unicode has some great cavaliers! If a few people encode a significant number of texts according to their preferences, this implies a corpus in mixed encodings, which is what I am trying to avoid. As others have pointed out, the very situation you wish to avoid already exists. Some work is transliterated into Latin, some into Hebrew. It wouldn't surprise if Greek and Cyrillic transliteration wasn't practiced, as well. Also, there are conflicting code pages for Hebrew still in use, apparently. Of course. And the point of Unicode is to move away from this situation of multiple encodings for the same script, by providing a single defined encoding for each one and properly defined conversion paths from legacy encodings. With Unicode, there will be no need to continue to encode Phoenician or Hebrew with 8-bit masquerading fonts and visual ordering (and yes, Michael, such things are a big problem and I agree that we should try to eradicate them), and it will be possible to convert texts to proper Unicode encoding. But if there are two competing Unicode encodings for the same text, and no defined mappings between them (as both compatibility equivalence and interleaved collation seem to have been ruled out), the advantages of going to Unicode are lost. Either way things end up, the end-user just has to click a couple of buttons. Where's the problem? Well, it's a lot more complex than this for searches, that's where the basic problem will be. Plus people don't particularly like being labelled cavalierly and antiquarian, when in fact it is the cavalierly (proposed) actions of Unicode which are ignoring what they want to continue to do. On 22/05/2004 16:20, Michael Everson wrote: At 15:47 -0700 2004-05-22, Peter Kirk wrote: As I understand it, what at least a number of Semitic scholars want to do is not to transliterate, but to represent Phoenician texts with Phoenician letters with the Unicode Hebrew characters, and fonts with Phoenician glyphs at the Hebrew character code points. In other words, to treat the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician as a font change, like the difference between Fraktur and normal Latin script. More hearsay! Who has offered any evidence of this? No one. ... Well, Dean Snyder has been saying for some time that he wants the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician to be a font change, and it is certainly what Dr Kaufman has in mind. If you don't accept evidence from top scholars in this field, whose evidence will you accept? And if you want evidence of use of corresponding glyph to code point mappings for Phoenician/palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew fonts, looks at the following: http://members.tripod.com/~ebionite/fonts.htm: palaeo-Hebrew mapped as Web Hebrew, which is basically ISO 8859-8 visual. http://www.historian.net/files.htm: set of various Semitic fonts including Phoenician with the same mappings. http://www.linguistssoftware.com/archaic.htm. etc. ... Will they be allowed to do that after a Phoenician block is defined, or will they not? If the answer is that they will not, this justifies the objection that a new Phoenician block interferes with the work of the real experts in the field, in order to meet the not very clearly defined requirements of a few non-experts. I consider this to be a theoretical construct
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson wrote at 12:20 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2004: FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME, Anyone working in the field is going to have to deal with the corpus being available for searching in LATIN transliteration ANYWAY. So, you admit it is a problem, something we will have to deal with. And precisely one of my points - why ADD to the problem? Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Kirk wrote: On 22/05/2004 19:41, Mark E. Shoulson wrote: Peter Kirk wrote: The fear is rather that a few people, who are not true Semitic scholars, will embrace the new range, and by doing so will make things much harder for the majority who don't need and don't want the new encoding. One of the original purposes of Unicode was to move away from the old situation in which many different incompatible encodings were used for the same language and script. We don't want to get back into that situation. That's awfully elitist, isn't it? Some *non*-scholars want it (if they'll embrace it, it follows that they'd want it if offered), but we can't be swayed by the desires of the hoi polloi. Non-scholars get to use Unicode too, and have a right to influence what gets in it. Just because the userbase isn't the people you thought it would be doesn't mean they don't count. My intention here is not elitist but democratic, to consider the requirements of the majority of people who actually use the scripts in question. Hoi polloi (Greek: the majority) don't actually use Phoenician script. Semitic scholars do. A rather small number of other people do. I am suggesting that we look for the views of the majority of those who actually use the script. And of the views expressed on this list by actual users, or reported here with specific names and details, I see a majority for unifying Phoenician with Hebrew. In fact I think only two actual users have favoured non-unification, Deborah Anderson and George Khalaf, plus Michael if he is really a user himself. But several users, Semitic scholars, have favoured unification. We've been through this: it isn't about who's the majority. If the majority wants one thing and there is a significant *minority* that wants the other, Unicode has to go with the minority. Otherwise we'd just all stick with US-ASCII. Unicode is supposed to be universal, not a servant of the majority alone. You can't have it both ways: if, as you admit, there are likely to be a fair number of people who will use Phoenician--people, not necessarily scholars with publications in all the right journals--that indicates that there *is* a potential userbase, and thus there are people who would be served by it. The fact that there are people who would be served by it indicates that Unicode should provide it. That there are other people who would not be served by it is neither here nor there. ... I don't think the majority vs. one or two malcontents picture that you're drawing here is even vaguely reminiscent of reality. I don't claim an overwhelming majority. But even if it is only four to three, that is still a majority. Four to three is an excellent reason to listen to the three. Or else we could all just take a vote and see if CJK or Latin should be the *only* alphabet we encode. After all, the others are just minorities. And you're telling me you're not being elitist? Listen to yourself. Besides, this is hardly a representative sampling. I'm sure both sides could find more supporters; nobody's polled the entire pool of Semiticists in the world (and even if they had, as you said yourself, there are non-Semiticists who will use Phoenician--*and their needs must be considered too*). There is no reason to believe that the minuscule sample we've seen in any way reflects the actual division of opinion, except that we *can* assume that our informants do not speak only for themselves and thus there is at least some support on both sides of the issue. I can't believe you're saying that four scholars vs. three scholars means we have to disregard the needs of the three; I'm completely flabbergasted by that. Anyway, didn't you yourself say that once you heard from Deborah Anderson, you saw that there was in fact a need for this, and that removed your objections to the proposal? Why the change of position? ~mark
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Philippe Verdy wrote at 7:54 PM on Sunday, May 23, 2004: What is unique in Phoenician is that it has a weak directionality (can be written in either direction, although RTL is probably more common and corresponds to the most important sources of usage in old sacred texts from which semitic script familiess for Aramaic or Early Hebrew have genetic relations). Phoenician is right-to-left. In fact, that is one of the arguments against a Phoenician source for Archaic Greek, which exhibits right-to- left, left-to-right, and boustrophedon. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Curtis Clark wrote at 9:02 PM on Saturday, May 22, 2004: It's hard for me to believe that the world community of Semitic scholars is so small or monolithic that there aren't differences of opinion among them. I have been almost automatically suspicious of the posts by the Semiticists opposed to encoding Phoenician; after thirty-four years in academia (longer if I count that my father was a professor when I was a youth), I have yet to see a field in which there were not differences of opinion. Admittedly, all Semiticists might agree on the nature of Phoenician (just as all chemists accept the periodic table), but the fervor exhibited here makes me wonder what the issues *really* are. I am used to seeing such fervor among academics only when there has been some unstated agenda at work. And so I wonder, are we in this list reading only one side of an internal squabble among Semiticists? Certainly not that I'm aware of. I am speaking my for myself. And I am not carrying on private discussions with anyone about this issue. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Mark E. Shoulson wrote at 10:41 PM on Saturday, May 22, 2004: And not a single Hebrew-reader I spoke to, native or not, could even conceive of Paleo-Hebrew being a font-variant of Hebrew. They found the proposition laughable. I'm a Hebrew reader, and I consider it a font change. I would like to see the evidence to back your assessment. I'm guessing none of your test subjects have read Paleo-Hebrew texts, like the Dead Sea scroll ones. If not, how can they make judgements on this issue? It would be like testing readers of Roman German who had never read Fraktur - they wouldn't recognize it as a font change either (which it is, of course, in Unicode). Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Kirk. On 2004-05-12 you recanted and said that you agreed with my conclusion. I assumed that meant you supported the encoding of Phoenician. Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps you changed your mind. Grand. Perhaps you will change it again. Or not. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 08:45 -0400 2004-05-24, Dean Snyder wrote: Michael Everson wrote at 12:20 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2004: FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME, Anyone working in the field is going to have to deal with the corpus being available for searching in LATIN transliteration ANYWAY. So, you admit it is a problem, something we will have to deal with. I admit that the world's writing systems, and the practices of users, are untidy. And precisely one of my points - why ADD to the problem? Because all the whining we have heard about the awfulness of the problem isn't convincing. Because you (and your flavour of Semiticist) are not the only users of the Phoenician script. Because supporting the needs of those who do not prefer to transliterate into Latin or Square Hebrew is the right thing to do. This has been done to death. Lots of people have tried to get through to you. Clearly you enjoy the attention fanning the flames of argument by saying the same thing over and over again. It isn't very interesting any more. It's been a month. You aren't convinced. You aren't going to be convinced. Go thou, Mr Snyder, and use Square Hebrew if it pleaseth thee. I stand by my proposal, and shall. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
PH as font variant of Hebrew (was RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Kirk Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 3:08 AM As I understand it, what at least a number of Semitic scholars want to do is not to transliterate, but to represent Phoenician texts with Phoenician letters with the Unicode Hebrew characters... More hearsay! Who has offered any evidence of this? No one. ... Well, Dean Snyder has been saying for some time that he wants the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician to be a font change... The issue here is that what you say scholars want to do (viz. encode using Unicode Hebrew characters and display with PH glyphs) is already technically possible, and so if they *really do* want to do that, then it's not unreasonable to expect that they might have attempted to do so. But that would imply the existence of such fonts. So, if such fonts do not exist, it calls into question whether in fact the claim is true. (And if the only PH fonts have glyphs on Latin characters, then the only argument they could support would be an argument to unify PH with Latin! They otherwise demonstrate nothing except historical practice.) And if you want evidence of use of corresponding glyph to code point mappings for Phoenician/palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew fonts, looks at the following: http://www.historian.net/files.htm: set of various Semitic fonts including Phoenician with the same mappings. All the fonts I looked at on this site used W Sem glyphs for Latin characters. http://www.linguistssoftware.com/archaic.htm. These likewise appear to use Basic Latin characters. http://members.tripod.com/~ebionite/fonts.htm: palaeo-Hebrew mapped as Web Hebrew, which is basically ISO 8859-8 visual. Now, these are an interesting hodgepodge. Five different fonts, one of the square Hebrew (so I'll consider only the others): Evyoni Palaeo: encodes PH in the Basic Latin range Evyoni Megawriter: encodes PH in the Latin-1 range (and an illegal rip-off of Times New Roman, btw) Evyoni Hebrew Encoded Palaeo, Evyoni TNRH PalaeoHebrew (two more illegal TNR derivatives): Ta da! These actually do encode PH glphs using Unicode Hebrew characters. So, what does this demonstrate? - There is clear evidence that some people want to encode PH glyphs using Hebrew characters. - It supports the claim that there are Semitic scholars who consider PH characters and square Hebrew characters to be the same characters, with glyph variants (but we already knew this because some of these people have already told us this is their view). - If Semitic scholars want to encode PH as Hebrew characters and display with a font that uses PH glyphs, they have at least two fonts at their disposal (but, oops!, they are illegal fonts, so if they have moral integrity they won't use these but will look for others). And what does this not demonstrate? - That there is no reason to encode Phoenician as a separate script. It provides support for that case, but does not make the case on its own. There are other factors, notably the needs of users *other* than Semiticists. The point has been made by the unification camp more than once that encoding PH text using characters other than Hebrew makes it harder for Semiticists to search for data. But these people have not adequately responded to the counter-arguments (and in so doing have not adequately acknowledged the needs of non Semiticists) that - they do not need to encode their texts any differently, and in fact in a given research project the people involved in the project will most likely manage their own data and make sure it is encoded in one way according to their preferences (they already have to normalize their data to deal with the encoded-as-Hebrew vs. encoded-as-Latin issue); - it is not difficult to convert data, or to make retrieval software treat separately-encoded PH the same as Hebrew - for the non-Semiticist interested in PH but not Hebrew, searching for PH data in a sea of Hebrew data (if they are unified) is all but impossible. I think we can stop debating whether anybody considers PH characters to be the same as Hebrew characters, of whether anybody wants to encode PH text using Hebrew characters and display it using fonts with appropriate glyphs. I also think we should stop debating whether Phoenician script is a distinct script from Hebrew script (talking about the script, not encoded characters): it is clear that there is disagreement and that opinions are not going to change. The facts are that some consider them the same, and that some do not. We do not need to debate which view is correct; what we need to do is consider how we respond to each of those points of view when it comes to developing character encoding standards and IT implementations. And those considerations must take into account the needs of all users: Semiticists, and non-Semiticists. Peter Constable
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Kirk wrote, (on the use of transliteration fonts) OK. And you agree that this is a proper thing to do, and that it should not be considered a cavalierly and antiquarian action, a throwback to the past century? Well, I don't think it would be cavalier in any sense to use a transliteration font. Hardly antiquarian or throwback, either. But, I don't for a minute think it's the proper thing to do. I think it would be silly and churlish. How fortunate that those who wish to do so aren't bound by my opinions, eh? See, those favoring the Phoenician proposal (as I see it) are trying to serve everyone. It's a Universal character set, after all. Those opposed, who may think the supporters are silly and churlish (or worse), want to bind us by *their* opinions, don't they? I don't see this as serving everybody, rather it strikes me as being basically self-serving. (English is slippery. Whether the use of cavalierly above should be interpreted as 'like a gentleman' or 'with arrogance' would be a matter of opinion.) Ah, well, Unicode has some great cavaliers! It takes all kinds, as they say! Of course. And the point of Unicode is to move away from this situation of multiple encodings for the same script, ... And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.) Also, I'm having trouble understanding why Semitic scholars wouldn't relish the ability to display modern and palaeo-Hebrew side-by-side in the same plain text document. And, even if *all* Semitic scholars aren't jumping at the chance, why the heck would they want to prevent it? Best regards, James Kass On 22/05/2004 16:49, James Kass wrote: Peter Kirk wrote, As I understand it, what at least a number of Semitic scholars want to do is not to transliterate, but to represent Phoenician texts with Phoenician letters with the Unicode Hebrew characters, and fonts with Phoenician glyphs at the Hebrew character code points. In other words, to treat the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician as a font change, like the difference between Fraktur and normal Latin script. Will they be allowed to do that after a Phoenician block is defined, or will they not? They'd simply use what's been called a transliteration font for this purpose. In order to effect the change, they'd probably have to click a button or two. Indeed, if they wanted to transliterate *and* trans-code, they'd have to click a button or two, too. In other words, the end-user's burden for either approach would be about the same, a couple of clicks. From a programming point of view, it's about as easy to re-map an existing font for masquerade/transliteration purposes as it is to write a character set conversion routine. Once again, for the end-user, the trouble involved should be about the same. In one case they install a font (font program), in the other case they install a character set conversion program. OK. And you agree that this is a proper thing to do, and that it should not be considered a cavalierly and antiquarian action, a throwback to the past century? ... (English is slippery. Whether the use of cavalierly above should be interpreted as 'like a gentleman' or 'with arrogance' would be a matter of opinion.) Ah, well, Unicode has some great cavaliers! If a few people encode a significant number of texts according to their preferences, this implies a corpus in mixed encodings, which is what I am trying to avoid. As others have pointed out, the very situation you wish to avoid already exists. Some work is transliterated into Latin, some into Hebrew. It wouldn't surprise if Greek and Cyrillic transliteration wasn't practiced, as well. Also, there are conflicting code pages for Hebrew still in use, apparently. Of course. And the point of Unicode is to move away from this situation of multiple encodings for the same script, by providing a single defined encoding for each one and properly defined conversion paths from legacy encodings. With Unicode, there will be no need to continue to encode Phoenician or Hebrew with 8-bit masquerading fonts and visual ordering (and yes, Michael, such things are a big problem and I agree that we should try to eradicate them), and it will be possible to convert texts to proper Unicode encoding. But if there are two competing Unicode encodings for the same text, and no defined mappings between them (as both compatibility equivalence and interleaved collation seem to have been ruled out), the advantages of going to Unicode are lost. Either way things end up, the end-user just has to click a couple of buttons. Where's the problem? Well, it's a lot
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
Doug Ewell wrote at 5:12 PM on Sunday, May 23, 2004: I absolutely DO disagree with the premise that lots of people would use a separate Fraktur encoding. To my knowledge there has been no request for one, and no serious desire on the part of scholars or anyone else to encode Fraktur text separately from Antiqua text. Don't forget I said lots of people RELATIVE to the potential number of users for separately encoded Phoenician. Do you disagree with THAT? I believe users would find it troublesome in the extreme to create a new encoding to represent German-language text where there has only been one before (unlike the apparent situation with Phoenician). Why would separately encoded Fraktur be troublesome? If your answer is what I expect, then this is precisely what I am saying for Palaeo-Hebrew (aka Phoenician) and Jewish-Hebrew (aka Square Hebrew). Dean, if you insist on using Fraktur as an example that Unicode does not separately encode script variants or font variants or diascripts (whatever that means) ... Diascript is to script as dialect is to language - part of a continuum of relatively minor variations. that lots of people would use, you must show some shred of evidence that lots of people would in fact use a separate Fraktur encoding. Does that make sense? Saying that is my opinion does not constitute evidence. Otherwise the analogy is pointless. Obviously - but only the number-of-potential-users analogy would be pointless, and not the inner script analogy comparing Fraktur/Roman with Palaeo-Hebrew/Jewish-Hebrew. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Dean Snyder wrote: Mark E. Shoulson wrote at 10:41 PM on Saturday, May 22, 2004: And not a single Hebrew-reader I spoke to, native or not, could even conceive of Paleo-Hebrew being a font-variant of Hebrew. They found the proposition laughable. I'm a Hebrew reader, and I consider it a font change. I would like to see the evidence to back your assessment. I've given you evidence: I *tried it out* on a bunch of experienced Hebrew readers, some of them native, and they couldn't even work out for sure which end to hold up. I'm guessing none of your test subjects have read Paleo-Hebrew texts, like the Dead Sea scroll ones. If not, how can they make judgements on this issue? It would be like testing readers of Roman German who had never read Fraktur - they wouldn't recognize it as a font change either (which it is, of course, in Unicode). I'm sure none of them have. But I dispute your claim. Even if the German readers couldn't read the fraktur, I'll bet they could recognize it as Latin letters, just in a font they can't completely make out. In fact, just for laughs, I'll try an experiment out this evening: I'll show my children (aged 6 and 8) some fraktur text and ask them what it is. It's unlikely they'll ever have seen it before. Maybe I'll even show it to them in German text, so it's even less likely for them to recognize. And maybe even some Suetterlin. Just to see if they say, at least, It's some letters... I can't really read them, though... Where's *your* evidence that Roman German readers wouldn't recognize fraktur? You asked for mine, and I've given some. ~mark
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
So, so sorry for a recent post. My ISP annexes original messages in their entirety as the default condition and doesn't allow users to change the default. So, if I forget to uncheck the danged box, I end up sending a 17 KB e-mail. Best regards, James Kass
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Kirk also wrote, But if there are two competing Unicode encodings for the same text, and no defined mappings between them (as both compatibility equivalence and interleaved collation seem to have been ruled out), Surely a transliteration table is a mapping in every sense of the word. There's only 22 original letters involved. Even allowing for final forms of a few of the letters, it'd be an awfully small table and so easy to make! How hard is it to convert between Urdu (Arabic) and Punjabi (Gurmukhi)? How hard is it to convert from Sanskrit text in Unicode Devanagari to Sanskrit text in Unicode Bengali? the advantages of going to Unicode are lost. Not at all. The advantage of encoding separate scripts separately (which is what Unicode does) is that they can all be stored in the same plain text documents without mark-up or loss of script identity. Well, it's a lot more complex than this for searches, that's where the basic problem will be. Searching for Yahweh won't find Eloahim. And that's just Latin text. In the olden days (hearkening once again back to those antiquarian days of the century past) searching for Upper Case wouldn't find upper case, either. But, things got better. You make a little program to generate ABCDEF into four different scripts (say, Latin Hebrew Phoenician Syriac), then paste the output into a Google advanced search window which finds web pages containing at least one of the words. Hacks work. Things get better. (You just hope what you wanted hadn't been transliterated into Greek or wasn't encoded in its original Ugaritic cuneiform or something.) And Dean's suggestion that most people use Hebrew and Phoenician alike in ASCII clones is not worth consideration as a reason to unify Hebrew and Phoenician. Why not? How about 8-bit ISCII? ( http://tdil.mit.gov.in/standards.htm ) quote There are manifold advantages in having a common code and keyboard for all the Indian scripts. end quote Are there any Syriac fonts using Web Hebrew? Ugaritic Cuneiform fonts using Web Hebrew? Best regards, James Kass
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
At 09:37 -0400 2004-05-24, Dean Snyder wrote: Why would separately encoded Fraktur be troublesome? Blind as well as deaf, apparently. It's already encoded. It's already not troublesome. Diascript is to script as dialect is to language - part of a continuum of relatively minor variations. Making up a word and using it over and over again does not mean that the word has meaning or that other people (especially experts in writing systems) are going to believe that it is a word. In any case we're encoding the significant nodes in your *diascript. Similarly, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Danish are distinguished, as are the Romance languages. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Dean Snyder scripsit: It would be like testing readers of Roman German who had never read Fraktur - they wouldn't recognize it as a font change either (which it is, of course, in Unicode). I see the words The New York Times in Fraktur (more or less) every day. It's obviously a font variant of Latin. -- Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before. --Nicholas van Rijn John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ccil.org/~cowan http://www.reutershealth.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 13:09 + 2004-05-24, James Kass wrote: And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.) Why, James, we gave evidence a month ago that the ancient Hebrews considered it to be a different script than the one they had learned in exile. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
justifying encoding (was RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark E. Shoulson Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 5:47 AM The fact that there are people who would be served by it indicates that Unicode should provide it. Careful, here: the fact that people would be served by it indicates that UTC should *consider* providing it. But the further consideration is whether those people can be served *without* it. If they would be served by it and cannot be well served without it, *then* we conclude that UTC should provide it. Peter Constable
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
James Kass scripsit: Well, I don't think it would be cavalier in any sense to use a transliteration font. Hardly antiquarian or throwback, either. But, I don't for a minute think it's the proper thing to do. I think it would be silly and churlish. I'm more of a ceorl than a chevalier, myself. Strictly foot-bound peasant stock. those who wish to do so aren't bound by my opinions, eh? The widespread use (as opposed to the mere existence) of a Phoenician encoding in Unicode imposes costs on at least some Semiticists that they do not wish to pay, at least without some assistance from Unicode. Hence my desire to have Phoenician and Hebrew collate together at the first level (more for searching than for sorting). -- John Cowan www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Penguin shall hunt and devour all that is crufty, gnarly and bogacious; all code which wriggles like spaghetti, or is infested with blighting creatures, or is bound by grave and perilous Licences shall it capture. And in capturing shall it replicate, and in replicating shall it document, and in documentation shall it bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earth and all who code therein. --Gospel of Tux
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
on 2004-05-24 06:37 Dean Snyder wrote: Diascript is to script as dialect is to language - part of a continuum of relatively minor variations. A script is a diascript with an army? (To paraphrase a saying about dialects...) -- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
I want to start out by saying that, although I personally support encoding Phoenician, I really have no stake in the outcome one way or the other, and I'm only participating in the thread from Hell (as I believe James Kass called it) because its dynamics interest me. on 2004-05-24 03:08 Peter Kirk wrote: If so, please give us some evidence for another side. I have none. I would be astonished if there weren't another side, but far stranger things than that have happened, and I've been wrong before. But maybe it is something else. For example, if you read evolutionary biologists strongly defending Darwinian evolution against creationist theories, does that imply an internal squabble among evoutionary biologists and therefore that some support creationism? Or does it rather imply a closing of ranks against outsiders who are attacking their discipline, a defence against (what they perceive as) unscientific attacks from those who don't know what they are talking about? This is a very apt analogy. IMO, it is *precisely* because evolutionary biologists disagree about some fundamental issues in evolutionary biology (such as the relative importance and scope of natural selection) that they close ranks. As a result, some of the arguments presented against creationism are caricatures. And the they don't know what they are talking about rhetoric is common on both sides. As one who has debated creationists, I know that there are other approaches, that work incrementally better in educating people whose minds are not already made up. But the Semiticists who have posted against the proposal on this group seem to be falling into the same closed-rank pattern that I know so well from my own field. -- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Mark E. Shoulson mark at kli dot org wrote: I'm guessing none of your test subjects have read Paleo-Hebrew texts, like the Dead Sea scroll ones. If not, how can they make judgements on this issue? It would be like testing readers of Roman German who had never read Fraktur - they wouldn't recognize it as a font change either (which it is, of course, in Unicode). Of course they would. We are dramatically exaggerating the differences between Fraktur and Antiqua here. I'm sure none of them have. But I dispute your claim. Even if the German readers couldn't read the fraktur, I'll bet they could recognize it as Latin letters, just in a font they can't completely make out. In fact, just for laughs, I'll try an experiment out this evening: I'll show my children (aged 6 and 8) some fraktur text and ask them what it is. It's unlikely they'll ever have seen it before. Maybe I'll even show it to them in German text, so it's even less likely for them to recognize. And maybe even some Suetterlin. Just to see if they say, at least, It's some letters... I can't really read them, though... Remember, I've already performed a similar experiment. Supposedly Vietnamese wasn't legible in Fraktur. Well, I printed out some Vietnamese in Fraktur (without diacritics, which made the Vietnamese even harder to recognize), and my Vietnamese colleague who learned English as a second language and does not know German recognized it immediately. And when shown the Stterlin, he couldn't read it but certainly recognized it as handwriting. Look here with this Fraktur thing: There is a school of thought that says Phoenician and Hebrew are different scripts that have diverged in some sense. Obviously not everyone subscribes to this school of thought; Dean Snyder is perhaps our most prominent example. That's fine, OK? But there is NO school of thought that Fraktur and Antiqua are different scripts that have diverged in any meaningful way. Fraktur use of round-s and long-s was completely mirrored by Antigua use at the time both styles were in heavy use, and the sharp-s ligature continues to be used in Antiqua. Fraktur is a stylistic variant of the Latin script, plain and simple, and should not be used to try to prove one side or the other in this dispute over Phoenician. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
James Kass wrote: Also, I'm having trouble understanding why Semitic scholars wouldn't relish the ability to display modern and palaeo-Hebrew side-by-side in the same plain text document. Because they want to search documents in the Hebrew *language* using Hebrew characters in search strings? Because they don't want to guess in what script variant an online corpus is encoded when doing searches? Because plain-text distinction of script variant text in the same language is just about the least important thing in their work? Because they have yet to see a good argument for why anyone would need to make such a distinction? John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson wrote, At 13:09 + 2004-05-24, James Kass wrote: And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.) Why, James, we gave evidence a month ago that the ancient Hebrews considered it to be a different script than the one they had learned in exile. It was hoped that they'd go off someplace looking for an ancient Phoenician inscription that says something like, 'this alphabet of ours may mutate into something unrecognizable in a few thousand years, but we'd still consider it the same script'. It wasn't expected that they'd find any such thing, though. Best regards, James Kass
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On 24/05/2004 05:47, Mark E. Shoulson wrote: ... We've been through this: it isn't about who's the majority. If the majority wants one thing and there is a significant *minority* that wants the other, Unicode has to go with the minority. Otherwise we'd just all stick with US-ASCII. Unicode is supposed to be universal, not a servant of the majority alone. Well, I have two points here: 1) If a *significant* minority wants a proposal which doesn't have adverse effects on the majority, fine. But I question whether just two or three supporters is *significant* enough for a separate standard encoding rather than PUA. 2) If group A supports a proposal which will have *adverse* effects on group B, then, in my opinion, the proposal should only be accepted if group A is significantly larger than group B. You can't have it both ways: if, as you admit, there are likely to be a fair number of people who will use Phoenician ... I have never accepted this position. I have seen no evidence that more than two or three people will use Phoenician. But that still means that some people will use it and confuse things for everyone else. It's just like Klingon. You and a few others wanted to use it. No one else did. But if it had been defined and your small group had started to publish widely with it, it would have made things more difficult for those who preferred Klingon in Latin script. For example, they would have to do double searches of the archives of Klingon publications for the articles they wanted. ... I don't claim an overwhelming majority. But even if it is only four to three, that is still a majority. Four to three is an excellent reason to listen to the three. Or else we could all just take a vote and see if CJK or Latin should be the *only* alphabet we encode. After all, the others are just minorities. And you're telling me you're not being elitist? Listen to yourself. I have listened to the three, or mostly to one of the three (and a few people like you who support him but are not users) patiently and repeatedly for the last month or more. All I have heard are the same unconvincing arguments and appeals to his own authority. There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions and with interleaved collation, also encoding as variation sequences, but the only response I get amounts to No, because Phoenician is a separate script, because I say so and this is the right thing to do. Besides, this is hardly a representative sampling. I'm sure both sides could find more supporters; nobody's polled the entire pool of Semiticists in the world (and even if they had, as you said yourself, there are non-Semiticists who will use Phoenician--*and their needs must be considered too*). There is no reason to believe that the minuscule sample we've seen in any way reflects the actual division of opinion, except that we *can* assume that our informants do not speak only for themselves and thus there is at least some support on both sides of the issue. Agreed. Several people have tried to get broader input, but with little success because few on either side understand the issues. I can't believe you're saying that four scholars vs. three scholars means we have to disregard the needs of the three; I'm completely flabbergasted by that. I am not disregarding the needs of the three. But the three, or one of them, insist that the needs of four (and probably considerably more) must be disregarded, and won't even discuss mediating positions. And they aren't even the majority. I'm completely flabbergasted by that. Anyway, didn't you yourself say that once you heard from Deborah Anderson, you saw that there was in fact a need for this, and that removed your objections to the proposal? Why the change of position? Yes, you are right, I did say that. It is the continued bad arguments of those in favour of the proposal, fanning the flames of argument by saying the same thing over and over again, which have made me reconsider, because I refuse to associate myself with their positions. Anyway, I don't think I ever accepted that Phoenician should be entirely separated from Hebrew, but I accepted that a good argument could be made for separate encoding with interleaved collation. That remains my position. On 24/05/2004 06:09, James Kass wrote: ... And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.) Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said yes because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. The change to square script took
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
We have statements from real Semiticists who do not want their names dropped into this fray that they support the encoding of Phoenician as a separate and distinct script from Square Hebrew. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Kirk wrote: . Of course. And the point of Unicode is to move away from this situation of multiple encodings for the same script, by providing a single defined encoding for each one and properly defined conversion paths from legacy encodings. Yes, for *each* one. With Unicode, there will be no need to continue to encode Phoenician or Hebrew with 8-bit masquerading fonts and visual ordering (and yes, Michael, such things are a big problem and I agree that we should try to eradicate them), and it will be possible to convert texts to proper Unicode encoding. But if there are two competing Unicode encodings for the same text, and no defined mappings between them (as both compatibility equivalence and interleaved collation seem to have been ruled out), the advantages of going to Unicode are lost. Even if there is no defined mapping between the two scripts, it won't be difficult to make one. Interleaved collation can be achieved creating and using a tailored collation table. There's no rocket science involved in doing this. Once person has created these they can share them with the community of Semitic scholars that has a need for them. Why are you making these things out to be difficult? If you've no one else to do it, I volunteer to make a interleaved collation table for Phoenician Hebrew and make a utility to trans-code from Phoenician to Hebrew - once Phoenician is encoded. These should take much less time write than your responses in this discussion. - Chris
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 08:26 -0700 2004-05-24, John Hudson wrote: Because they want to search documents in the Hebrew *language* using Hebrew characters in search strings? They can do that. Because they don't want to guess in what script variant an online corpus is encoded when doing searches? They have to already, since many use Latin transliteration. Because plain-text distinction of script variant text in the same language is just about the least important thing in their work? Other people have other work. Because they have yet to see a good argument for why anyone would need to make such a distinction? They don't want to see the arguments as good. That doesn't mean they aren't good arguments. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
John Hudson wrote, Also, I'm having trouble understanding why Semitic scholars wouldn't relish the ability to display modern and palaeo-Hebrew side-by-side in the same plain text document. Because they want to search documents in the Hebrew *language* using Hebrew characters in search strings? Because they don't want to guess in what script variant an online corpus is encoded when doing searches? Guessing's not their job. It's up to a sophisticated search engine to find what users seek. Some of us have tried to dispel some of these fears by pointing out possible solutions. Do we allow current technology, such as present search engine constraints, to dictate what we encode? Or is search engine technology beyond the scope of a plain text encoding standard? Font and rendering technologies had to catch up with the standard, as you know -- the idea that complex scripts couldn't even be *displayed* didn't stop them from being encoded as complex scripts in the standard. Can a Sanskrit scholar find Sanskrit text on-line if the search string uses Devanagari characters and the on-line text is in a different script? Should the Indic scripts have been unified for this reason? Because plain-text distinction of script variant text in the same language is just about the least important thing in their work? Because they've never had the ability to do this in the past? Because they have yet to see a good argument for why anyone would need to make such a distinction? Because it's there? If Sir Edmund Hillary (hope the name's spelled right) had awaited some kind of an epiphany revealing a better reason, would he have ever made it to the top? You've asked some good questions here. It's hoped that my answers aren't just sententious. Best regards, James Kass
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
saqqara a écrit : I showed my 5 year old some Fraktur (lower case only) for the first time today. He is only just getting to grips with reading simple English words. And the verdict .. 'funny and silly' but he could still read the words back to me. Anecdotal perhaps but Dean, do you want me test the other 29 of his class at school before we can be rid of this fallacious Fraktur analogy? Try with Sütterlin also unified within Latin ;-) http://www.cooptel.qc.ca/~pandries/suetterlin.jpg (Sorry) P. A.
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Doug Ewell a crit : And when shown the Stterlin, he couldn't read it but certainly recognized it as handwriting. So would he when submitted with a Cyrillic handwriting ? P. A.
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
On 24/05/2004 07:47, Curtis Clark wrote: on 2004-05-24 06:37 Dean Snyder wrote: Diascript is to script as dialect is to language - part of a continuum of relatively minor variations. A script is a diascript with an army? (To paraphrase a saying about dialects...) And the Phoenicians haven't had an army since Hannibal's elephants were defeated. Does that imply that Phoenician is not a separate script? :-) On 24/05/2004 08:05, Curtis Clark wrote: I want to start out by saying that, although I personally support encoding Phoenician, I really have no stake in the outcome one way or the other, and I'm only participating in the thread from Hell (as I believe James Kass called it) because its dynamics interest me. on 2004-05-24 03:08 Peter Kirk wrote: If so, please give us some evidence for another side. I have none. I would be astonished if there weren't another side, but far stranger things than that have happened, and I've been wrong before. But maybe it is something else. For example, if you read evolutionary biologists strongly defending Darwinian evolution against creationist theories, does that imply an internal squabble among evoutionary biologists and therefore that some support creationism? Or does it rather imply a closing of ranks against outsiders who are attacking their discipline, a defence against (what they perceive as) unscientific attacks from those who don't know what they are talking about? This is a very apt analogy. IMO, it is *precisely* because evolutionary biologists disagree about some fundamental issues in evolutionary biology (such as the relative importance and scope of natural selection) that they close ranks. As a result, some of the arguments presented against creationism are caricatures. And the they don't know what they are talking about rhetoric is common on both sides. As one who has debated creationists, I know that there are other approaches, that work incrementally better in educating people whose minds are not already made up. But the Semiticists who have posted against the proposal on this group seem to be falling into the same closed-rank pattern that I know so well from my own field. Well, I see your point, but actually that is not what I see happening. One of the three supporters of the Phoenician proposal is a Semitic scholar. There has been open debate on the issue on the ANE list, see https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-May/012945.html and related postings - unfortunately the thread index doesn't work well. I note the following from Peter Daniels on the ANE list at https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-May/013076.html: / (The comment in the document about unifying Phoenician with // Proto-Sinaitic/ Proto-Canaanite was an error in the document and will // be removed in the revised version.) / It was obvious to the subscribers to this list that it was an error, as was clear from the discussion, but that it was circulated as part of an official Unicode proposal cast extremely grave doubts on the Unicode operation. Well, of course anyone can make a proposal to Unicode, and so errors in proposals do not reflect on the Unicode operation or the UTC, only on the proposer. On 24/05/2004 09:05, Michael Everson wrote: We have statements from real Semiticists who do not want their names dropped into this fray that they support the encoding of Phoenician as a separate and distinct script from Square Hebrew. I understand their reluctance. But how many, and how real? Are you prepared to provide evidence of their support to the UTC? -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson wrote: Why, James, we gave evidence a month ago that the ancient Hebrews considered it to be a different script than the one they had learned in exile. To be fair, it isn't at all clear from your evidence that the Ancient Hebrews had the same concept of 'script' as the Unicode Standard. I don't recall anything in what you cited that suggested anything more significant than a recognition of a change in the style of writing *the same Hebrew letters*, or as they might have said, if they did use Unicode parlance, the same abstract characters. The fact that they acknowledge that particular styles of writing are or are not appropriate for religious texts is neither surprising nor relevant, as the same distinctions are made between ktiva merubaat and stam. John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
The Thread From Hell continues. Peter Kirk writes, And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.) Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said yes because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. Of course, they'd have said no because modern Hebrew didn't exist in their time. So, they'd not even know what modern Hebrew was. The script used in their time for Hebrew wasn't very similar to their own script; it *was* their own script. Palaeo-Hebrew is a modern term and a modern concept. ... Very likely these font developers were simply confused by the licensing rules for Times New Roman. Yeah, that's probably it. Well, these Ebionites are not scholars but a revival of an ancient sect somewhere midway between Judaism and Christianity. Would you say that none of these Ebionites are scholars? So one thing which this does demonstrate is that there is a community of users other than scholars who are currently encoding paleo-Hebrew texts with Hebrew characters. Ever ask yourself why they do this? Is it possible that they do this in order to get RTL layout? Is it possible that they do this in order to be able to transliterate via fonts absent a standard Phoenician range? Good point. But of course this (alleged) person interested in Phoenician but not Hebrew will not be helped if more than one encoding is permitted for Phoenician. Anyway, this is a case where language tagging should be used rather than a separate script. And we use language tagging in plain text how? And Phoenician isn't already represented in more than one Unicode encoding? Agreed. And we have now seen that not all non-Semiticists want separate encoding, for it is clear that the Ebionites at least do not. And you know this because you've asked the Ebionites? Good point, Peter. No one has yet shown that anyone cannot be served *without* a separately encoded Phoenician script, only that a few people want it. Phoenician users can be served with Latin-hack transliteration fonts, in other words, without Unicode. But, can they be well-served? Best regards, James Kass
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 08:41 -0700 2004-05-24, Peter Kirk wrote: But if it had been defined and your small group had started to publish widely with it, it would have made things more difficult for those who preferred Klingon in Latin script. For example, they would have to do double searches of the archives of Klingon publications for the articles they wanted. That is your unproved assertion, and ignores the fact that your precious databases and archives already include multiscript representation of the languages you study. This insistance that your work will be damaged by the presence of Phoenician code positions is as untenable as it was when you first made it. I have listened to the three, or mostly to one of the three (and a few people like you who support him but are not users) patiently and repeatedly for the last month or more. All I have heard are the same unconvincing arguments and appeals to his own authority. I see the apology is rescinded too, and it is back to ad-hominem. There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions Which was rejected by Ken for good technical reasons. and with interleaved collation, Which was rejected for the default template (and would go against the practices already in place in the default template) but is available to you in your tailorings. also encoding as variation sequences, Which was rejected by Ken and others for good technical reasons, not the least of which was the p%r%e%p%o%s%t%e%r%o%u%s%n%e%s%s% of interleaving Hebrew text in order to get Phoenician glyphs. but the only response I get amounts to No, because Phoenician is a separate script, because I say so and this is the right thing to do. It is a pity that the facts are not obvious to you. It is clear that you don't want Phoenician to be a separate script, and you grasp at straws trying to make an encoded Phoenician into Hebrew. I am not disregarding the needs of the three. But the three, or one of them, insist that the needs of four (and probably considerably more) must be disregarded, and won't even discuss mediating positions. The technical solutions you have proposed have been inadequate. Yes, you are right, I did say that. It is the continued bad arguments of those in favour of the proposal, fanning the flames of argument by saying the same thing over and over again, which have made me reconsider, because I refuse to associate myself with their positions. Perhaps I should not have taken the bait that one of the unificationists set out. For that I apologize. Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said yes because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. That's why Palaeo-Hebrew and Hebrew are unified. The change to square script took place only after the Phoenicians had more or less lost their identity in their original homeland, although it was still used for a few centuries in and around Carthage. It is the later Square Script which has been encoded. We propose to encode other historically important, named, recognized nodes on the tree of scripts. This isn't difficult to understand. Thank you, Peter, for checking on these fonts, and for providing for us all the evidence Some evidence. This is not a show-stopper. I was only asking Dean to back up his claims. that Michael was asking Dean for, that there does exist fonts with Phoenician glyphs for Unicode Hebrew characters. It is not surprising that someone has done this, of course. It is no different from the Latin clones that others have used. I also thank Peter for coming up with the goods, since Dean was unable to back up his claim. Very likely these font developers were simply confused by the licensing rules for Times New Roman. Far likelier that they ignored them. Well, these Ebionites are not scholars but a revival of an ancient sect somewhere midway between Judaism and Christianity. Of course scholars are free to use their fonts, if copyright permits. So one thing which this does demonstrate is that there is a community of users other than scholars who are currently encoding paleo-Hebrew texts with Hebrew characters. Of course, they don't have an alternative. It's a Latin hack or a Hebrew hack. Indeed, they do both. But no one has answered my case about searching the Internet or other sets of texts from various sources. I have. Dozens of times. You have to take transliteration into account already. If this is not difficult, will Microsoft provide such conversion or retrieval software, e.g. by supporting customised collation? Take that up with your vendors. The UCA *is* intended to be tailorable, and all the vendors know it. But of course this (alleged) person interested in Phoenician but not Hebrew will not be helped if more than one encoding is permitted for Phoenician. The kind of
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
saqqara wrote: I'm genuinely interested in why Phoenician should not be regarded as a separate script but have yet to read a reasoned response to earlier posts. I think the view may be most succinctly expressed in this way: The numerous and visually varied 22-letter semitic writing systems all represent the same 22 abstract characters. The Unicode Standard encodes abstract characters. Ergo, only one set of codepoints is required to encode the 22-letter semitic writing systems. John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
James Kass wrote: Because they want to search documents in the Hebrew *language* using Hebrew characters in search strings? Because they don't want to guess in what script variant an online corpus is encoded when doing searches? Guessing's not their job. It's up to a sophisticated search engine to find what users seek. Some of us have tried to dispel some of these fears by pointing out possible solutions. Indeed, and I have made similar points to my semiticist and Biblical scholarship friends and correspondents regarding methods for working around the canonical combining class problems for Hebrew, and generally try to help people realise that the aspects of Unicode that seem to them 'broken' are not necessarily an impediment to getting work done. However, all this has left the understandable impression among many of these people that Unicode almost goes out of its way to make things difficult for people working with ancient Hebrew texts. Things that should be simple end up being complicated and require the development of sophisticated systems to perform simple tasks. Now the perception seems to be that in order to facilitate plain-text distinction of 'Phoenician' and Hebrew, yet more complexity and sophistication will be required to encode, search and study ancient texts. Frankly, I don't blame people for asking whether that distinction is worth the trouble. John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 10:18 -0700 2004-05-24, John Hudson wrote: To be fair, it isn't at all clear from your evidence that the Ancient Hebrews had the same concept of 'script' as the Unicode Standard. I don't recall anything in what you cited that suggested anything more significant than a recognition of a change in the style of writing *the same Hebrew letters*, or as they might have said, if they did use Unicode parlance, the same abstract characters. But we *do* and we have the history of the world's writing systems which lead *us* to consider these distinctions, in order to encode the world's writing systems in the Universal Character Set as more than a set of font variations on the alphabet. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson scripsit: and with interleaved collation, Which was rejected for the default template (and would go against the practices already in place in the default template) but is available to you in your tailorings. I don't accept that the existing practices are necessarily a controlling precedent. For sufficient reason we can override existing practices. I believe that sufficient reason does exist in this case. Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said yes because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. That's why Palaeo-Hebrew and Hebrew are unified. Palaeo-Hebrew and Phoenician, presumably. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. --Edsger Dijkstra
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On 24/05/2004 09:00, Christopher Fynn wrote: ... Even if there is no defined mapping between the two scripts, it won't be difficult to make one. Interleaved collation can be achieved creating and using a tailored collation table. There's no rocket science involved in doing this. Once person has created these they can share them with the community of Semitic scholars that has a need for them. Why are you making these things out to be difficult? If you've no one else to do it, I volunteer to make a interleaved collation table for Phoenician Hebrew and make a utility to trans-code from Phoenician to Hebrew - once Phoenician is encoded. These should take much less time write than your responses in this discussion. - Chris Well, are you volunteering to rewrite for me popular word processor, spreadsheet and database applications and web search engines which currently don't support tailored collation, so that they support your tailoring? That's the real issue, not defining the tailoring which is almost trivial. On 24/05/2004 10:12, James Kass wrote: The Thread From Hell continues. Well, if you have a problem with that you can always encourage its death by keeping quiet yourself! ;-) Peter Kirk writes, And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.) Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said yes because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. Of course, they'd have said no because modern Hebrew didn't exist in their time. So, they'd not even know what modern Hebrew was. The script used in their time for Hebrew wasn't very similar to their own script; it *was* their own script. Palaeo-Hebrew is a modern term and a modern concept. Precisely my point. For the Phoenicians, modern Hebrew was as spoken by their contemporaries, which was a dialect variation of their own language (structurally, although not by the armies test) and was written in the same script, with only slightly different glyph shapes. The distinction between palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew scripts/diascripts is one which arose later by gradual continuous change. ... Very likely these font developers were simply confused by the licensing rules for Times New Roman. Yeah, that's probably it. Well, these Ebionites are not scholars but a revival of an ancient sect somewhere midway between Judaism and Christianity. Would you say that none of these Ebionites are scholars? I don't know enough about the Ebionites to say. I didn't mean to imply anything negative about them. But they are a distinct community (though possibly with some overlap) from the recognised scholarly community of Semiticists. So one thing which this does demonstrate is that there is a community of users other than scholars who are currently encoding paleo-Hebrew texts with Hebrew characters. Ever ask yourself why they do this? Is it possible that they do this in order to get RTL layout? Is it possible that they do this in order to be able to transliterate via fonts absent a standard Phoenician range? Well, it is possible. But I suspect it is more likely that they considered (rightly or wrongly) that the correct Unicode characters to use for Hebrew language texts, whatever glyphs are to be used for displaying them, are the characters in the Hebrew block. Arguably they were confused by the Unicode distinction between script and language. But the result (whatever the motivation might have been) is that they have developed fonts with palaeo- glyphs for the Unicode Hebrew characters, and presumably texts to go with those fonts. Therefore they have a stake in this being the approved Unicode encoding for palaeo-Hebrew. Good point. But of course this (alleged) person interested in Phoenician but not Hebrew will not be helped if more than one encoding is permitted for Phoenician. Anyway, this is a case where language tagging should be used rather than a separate script. And we use language tagging in plain text how? The context here was searching the web for Phoenician texts. Texts on websites should not be plain text but should be marked with their language. Of course we can't be sure that they will be, but then we can't be sure of what encoding will be used. ... Good point, Peter. No one has yet shown that anyone cannot be served *without* a separately encoded Phoenician script, only that a few people want it. Phoenician users can be served with Latin-hack transliteration fonts, in other words, without Unicode. But, can they be well-served? No, not least because they have to use RLO...PDF or visual ordering. But they can be well served
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 13:37 -0400 2004-05-24, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't accept that the existing practices are necessarily a controlling precedent. In this case, I do. The default template separates scripts (apart from the Kana, which are conventionally mixed by everyone who uses them). There is no reason to stop doing this now. By the same token, Etruscan should not have been interfiled with Latin, nor should Carian and Lycian be interfiled with Greek. Or Phoenician. For sufficient reason we can override existing practices. I believe that sufficient reason does exist in this case. People who need to override the default template can do so, according to the standard. Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said yes because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. That's why Palaeo-Hebrew and Hebrew are unified. Palaeo-Hebrew and Phoenician, presumably. Yes, yes. I am weary of this dance. A slip of the fingers. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 10:22 -0700 2004-05-24, John Hudson wrote: saqqara wrote: I'm genuinely interested in why Phoenician should not be regarded as a separate script but have yet to read a reasoned response to earlier posts. I think the view may be most succinctly expressed in this way: The numerous and visually varied 22-letter semitic writing systems all represent the same 22 abstract characters. The Unicode Standard encodes abstract characters. Ergo, only one set of codepoints is required to encode the 22-letter semitic writing systems. Oh, goody. Back to square 1. Except that Semitic writing should not be handled differently from any other writing system. The same analogy can be made for many the Brahmic scripts, of course, since the *abstract* structure KA KHA GA GHA NGA runs true for so many of them. We could have unified the Philippine scripts, which are *very* similar. But we didn't. And we *did* use visual variation as a significant criterion which distinguishes these scripts. A Sanskrit text *can* be transcoded 1:1 between many of these scripts. A strong tradition of scholarship considers Phoenician to be antecedent to a number of scripts, including Greek and the form of Aramaic which gave rise to Square Hebrew (which has given rise to a great typographic tradition of its own). That tradition does not consider all of these numerous and visually-varied 22-letter Semitic writing systems to be abstract glyph variants of a single underlying structure. It distinguishes them clearly in the same some of these things are not like the others way that is a criterion for plain text representation, certainly for the group of scholars -- and educators and other enthusiasts -- which makes this distinction. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson scripsit: People who need to override the default template can do so, according to the standard. If they're lucky. The less lucky will only get default-UCA sorting. The least lucky will get nothing but binary codepoint sorting and a few language-specific hacks. The default template is about least-astonishing behavior. I judge mixed sorting (at level 1) to be least astonishing. -- But I am the real Strider, fortunately, John Cowan he said, looking down at them with his face [EMAIL PROTECTED] softened by a sudden smile. I am Aragorn son http://www.ccil.org/~/cowan of Arathorn, and if by life or death I can http://www.reutershealth.com save you, I will. --LotR Book I Chapter 10
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 14:22 -0400 2004-05-24, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Michael Everson scripsit: People who need to override the default template can do so, according to the standard. If they're lucky. The less lucky will only get default-UCA sorting. I have spoken to representatives of two important vendors in the past who *do* understand that this requirement is an architectural feature of the Unicode Standard and who *do* understand that there is a requirement for people to be able to get access to it. Therefore I remain more optimistic than you in this matter. The default template is about least-astonishing behavior. I judge mixed sorting (at level 1) to be least astonishing. I consider interleaved mixed-script text to be illegible, and unsuitable for the default template. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: PH as font variant of Hebrew (was RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
- for the non-Semiticist interested in PH but not Hebrew, searching for PH data in a sea of Hebrew data (if they are unified) is all but impossible. But that's true for every two uses of a script. I can't search for German or Irish in a sea of English data, or Japanese in a sea of Chinese. I guess considering the close relation of the two, I should say I can't search for Norweigan Nynorsk in a sea of Bokal. -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (James Kass) writes: Guessing's not their job. It's up to a sophisticated search engine to find what users seek. Some of us have tried to dispel some of these fears by pointing out possible solutions. The exact same search engine can search among Fraktur and Roman scripts, too. Unicode shouldn't add to the complexity of systems, except where necessary. the idea that complex scripts couldn't even be *displayed* didn't stop them from being encoded as complex scripts in the standard. That's because that's what they were, and that's how they needed to be encoded for proper handling. Can a Sanskrit scholar find Sanskrit text on-line if the search string uses Devanagari characters and the on-line text is in a different script? Probably not; and I don't see that feature being added in the near future. You couldn't help the Sanskrit scholar without hurting more important groups, but the Phoenician scholar is the most important group using Phoenician. Because plain-text distinction of script variant text in the same language is just about the least important thing in their work? Because they've never had the ability to do this in the past? But they have. They could have printed in a Phoenician font, but they chose modern Hebrew fonts, just like the middle English scholar uses modern English fonts. Because it's there? If Sir Edmund Hillary (hope the name's spelled right) had awaited some kind of an epiphany revealing a better reason, would he have ever made it to the top? Klingon is there too. So is Ewellic. Neither would cause any problem with the standard, or have anything debatable about structure or encoding. If we're going to start encoding stuff because it's there, maybe we should start with stuff that doesn't get in other people's way? -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson wrote: To be fair, it isn't at all clear from your evidence that the Ancient Hebrews had the same concept of 'script' as the Unicode Standard. I don't recall anything in what you cited that suggested anything more significant than a recognition of a change in the style of writing *the same Hebrew letters*, or as they might have said, if they did use Unicode parlance, the same abstract characters. But we *do* and we have the history of the world's writing systems which lead *us* to consider these distinctions, in order to encode the world's writing systems in the Universal Character Set as more than a set of font variations on the alphabet. No one is suggesting the latter. What is being suggested is that in considering the position of semitic scripts in the history of the world's writing systems the opinion of semitic scholars should not be secondary to that of generalist writers, most of whom have addressed ancient semitic scripts only from the perspective of their historically assumed contribution to Greek civilisation. Classification is an arbitrary process in which one produces useful categories into which to arrange an otherwise unwieldy body of knowledge. The classification of scripts in the general history of the world's writing systems is useful for writing general histories of writing systems. It does not necessarily represent the truth. Unicode also classifies scripts and seeks to do so in a way that is useful for text processing. This is well and good. What I have found problematic in your defence of the Phoenician proposal, Michael, is your assumption that the classification of script used in histories of writing systems naturally corresponds to the classification of scripts in Unicode, such that the fact that a number of books call something a script means that it should have a separate code block in Unicode. When non-generalists state that this historical classification is not useful for text processing purposes, and indeed that they disagree, from a specialist perspective, with that generalist history, they deserve better than 'Of course it is a separate script, I have a lot of books that say it is'. John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson wrote: We have statements from real Semiticists who do not want their names dropped into this fray that they support the encoding of Phoenician as a separate and distinct script from Square Hebrew. Are these statements going to be registered as documents? It would be nice to know what reasons are given. John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (James Kass) writes: And we use language tagging in plain text how? I seem to remember the Japanese asking that. And I seem to remember Unicode encoding the Plane 14 tags for that. And I seem to remember people saying that if you want language tagging, you shouldn't be using plain text. -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Oh, well this was already discussed back an forth some ten days ago - as most of this thread. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If they're lucky. The less lucky will only get default-UCA sorting. The least lucky will get nothing but binary codepoint sorting and a few language-specific hacks. Non default-UCA collations are universally deployed. Applications and tools with user- or community configurable tailoring of collations are available, also as FOSS. So, those stuck with 'default-UCA' are not less lucky, but less willing to switch. This sounds like self-inflicted harm to me. Best Regards, Peter Jacobi -- NEU : GMX Internet.FreeDSL Ab sofort DSL-Tarif ohne Grundgebühr: http://www.gmx.net/dsl
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael, Michael Everson wrote: At 10:22 -0700 2004-05-24, John Hudson wrote: saqqara wrote: I'm genuinely interested in why Phoenician should not be regarded as a separate script but have yet to read a reasoned response to earlier posts. I think the view may be most succinctly expressed in this way: The numerous and visually varied 22-letter semitic writing systems all represent the same 22 abstract characters. The Unicode Standard encodes abstract characters. Ergo, only one set of codepoints is required to encode the 22-letter semitic writing systems. Oh, goody. Back to square 1. All Hudson is pointing out is that long PRIOR to Unicode, Semitic scholars reached the conclusion all Semitic languages share the same 22 characters. A long standing and quite useful conclusion that has nothing at all to do with your proposal. Why? Because that conclusion has NOTHING to do with how any Semitic language is represented in any script other than as transliteration. What has happened is that conclusion has been brought into a Unicode discussion that does not share that viewpoint and in fact has its own criteria for encoding of scripts. Nothing more remarkable than that. I took the gist of Hudson's post to simply be pointing out that some of the questions about your proposal arise from their proponents starting from an alien (in the sense of non-Unicode) point of view. From that perspective, I think it was a quite useful observation and not a Back to square 1. sort of comment. It illustrates why at least some fo the disagreement/opposition has arisen, which I think is a useful contribution. To answer John's later question about what uses other Semitic scholars see for the Phoenician proposal, the ones that have been voiced to me include, grammars and other pedagogical materials, and more general publications. I think formal documentation is being prepared along those lines. For some purposes, such as comparative analysis, the actual script of the original text is really secondary. But, for other purposes, such as those where the script in which a text is written is important, then preservation of that information is important. Really depends on the use to which you intend to put the encoded text. Hope you are having a great day! Patrick -- Patrick Durusau Director of Research and Development Society of Biblical Literature [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson wrote: The numerous and visually varied 22-letter semitic writing systems all represent the same 22 abstract characters. The Unicode Standard encodes abstract characters. Ergo, only one set of codepoints is required to encode the 22-letter semitic writing systems. Oh, goody. Back to square 1. To clarify: I was not positing this syllogism as a new argument, only seeking to express as succinctly as possible the underlying logic of the opposition to the Phoenician proposal. I don't think this logic is at all unreasonable, any more than I think many of the arguments in favour of the proposal are unreasonable. This is why I don't think any decision can be made on the basis of argument about the identity of 'scripts': there are good arguments for and against different ways of encoding ancient Canaanite writing systems. Yes, I think most of this debate has been a waste of time, but not because either side is obviously right and the other wrong. As stated previously, the only useful question to ask -- and the only sensible target for those opposed to the proposal -- is whether there is really a 'need' for plain-text distinction of 'Phoenician' from Hebrew and, presumably, from some other forms of ancient Near Eastern writing. Patrick has, today, noted the existence of an inscription that includes both Punic and Neo-Punic forms: is this a distinction that someone might have a 'need' to make in plain-text? John Hudson -- Tiro Typeworkswww.tiro.com Vancouver, BC[EMAIL PROTECTED] Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Michael Everson wrote at 6:19 PM on Monday, May 24, 2004: That's why Palaeo-Hebrew and Hebrew are unified. That's an interesting change of opinion. What motivates your current unification of Palaeo-Hebrew and Hebrew? On what basis are you now separating Palaeo-Hebrew from Phoenician? Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 12:38 -0700 2004-05-24, John Hudson wrote: Michael Everson wrote: The numerous and visually varied 22-letter semitic writing systems all represent the same 22 abstract characters. The Unicode Standard encodes abstract characters. Ergo, only one set of codepoints is required to encode the 22-letter semitic writing systems. Oh, goody. Back to square 1. To clarify: I was not positing this syllogism as a new argument, only seeking to express as succinctly as possible the underlying logic of the opposition to the Phoenician proposal. I don't think this logic is at all unreasonable, any more than I think many of the arguments in favour of the proposal are unreasonable. Fine. The counter-argument was given, but it was deleted by you: A strong tradition of scholarship considers Phoenician to be antecedent to a number of scripts, including Greek and the form of Aramaic which gave rise to Square Hebrew (which has given rise to a great typographic tradition of its own). That tradition does not consider all of these numerous and visually-varied 22-letter Semitic writing systems to be abstract glyph variants of a single underlying structure. It distinguishes them clearly in the same some of these things are not like the others way that is a criterion for plain text representation, certainly for the group of scholars -- and educators and other enthusiasts -- which makes this distinction. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 15:56 -0400 2004-05-24, Dean Snyder wrote: Michael Everson wrote at 6:19 PM on Monday, May 24, 2004: That's why Palaeo-Hebrew and Hebrew are unified. That's an interesting change of opinion. It was a typo. What motivates your current unification of Palaeo-Hebrew and Hebrew? It was a typo. On what basis are you now separating Palaeo-Hebrew from Phoenician? It was a typo. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
From: John Hudson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Michael Everson wrote: Why, James, we gave evidence a month ago that the ancient Hebrews considered it to be a different script than the one they had learned in exile. To be fair, it isn't at all clear from your evidence that the Ancient Hebrews had the same concept of 'script' as the Unicode Standard. I don't recall anything in what you cited that suggested anything more significant than a recognition of a change in the style of writing *the same Hebrew letters*, or as they might have said, if they did use Unicode parlance, the same abstract characters. Yes but it is significant that Phoenician letters have letters named a bit differently than Hebrew letters, even when refered to by Semitists! If they name the letters differently, it's a clear sign that they already consider the letters as distinct (also because they want to respect the sacred Hebrew alphabet by not naming with Hebrew names the Phoenician letters). If Semitists make distinctions, then this is an evidence that these are distinct _abstract_ letters. As Unicode encodes distinct abstract letters separately, the Michael's proposal has some sense. Now the fact that it is easy to tweak a Hebrew font to make it look like Phoenician, or to encode it with Hebrew is a technical aspect which does not change the fact that they are still distinct abstract characters. It was done simply because there was no other easy choice, and depending on authors some chose to tweak the Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabet found in the standardized encodings they also use everyday to work with modern texts. There's already a problem for the interchange of data encoded in visual order with tweaked Latin or Greek encoding, or in logical order with tweaked Hebrew encoding... With a single coherent Phoenician encoding, both semitists and Indo-Europeanists could exchange their texts using a common encoding which will be treated unambiguously as Phoenician and not as Latin or Hebrew (depending on who reads the rendered text)...
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Yeah, I've wondered about this. I've said it before: if you put my back to the wall, I really don't think I could defend the disunification of U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A and U+0410 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A. But that's why they don't put me on the UTC. ~mark Patrick Andries wrote: Doug Ewell a crit : And when shown the Stterlin, he couldn't read it but certainly recognized it as handwriting. So would he when submitted with a Cyrillic handwriting ? P. A.
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
I can't believe we're still arguing this. Peter Kirk wrote: On 24/05/2004 05:47, Mark E. Shoulson wrote: ... We've been through this: it isn't about who's the majority. If the majority wants one thing and there is a significant *minority* that wants the other, Unicode has to go with the minority. Otherwise we'd just all stick with US-ASCII. Unicode is supposed to be universal, not a servant of the majority alone. Well, I have two points here: 1) If a *significant* minority wants a proposal which doesn't have adverse effects on the majority, fine. But I question whether just two or three supporters is *significant* enough for a separate standard encoding rather than PUA. We mentioned this. We don't have one or two. Our informants must be construed as representing some chunk of the populace, if only because they know the people they'll be communicating with. These folks don't work in a vacuum, they have colleagues with whom they correspond, and it's not unfair to assume that they have some idea of what would and would not be helpful in those correspondences. We have a sampling, and some say X and some say Y. It sounds to me like that means some people in the community believe X and some believe Y, not two or three believe X and all the rest believe Y. Who's to say the three or four we've heard from on the other side aren't the exceptions? That way lieth madness. 2) If group A supports a proposal which will have *adverse* effects on group B, then, in my opinion, the proposal should only be accepted if group A is significantly larger than group B. Perhaps, but the adverse effects in question, if they exist, are not incredible hardships. It's no worse than what group B *ALREADY DEALS WITH* so plainly it's not going to make life impossible for group B, since they haven't been driven to extinction yet. And I'm not even completely sure that's true in general. Unicode is supposed to be *universal*. If group A gets something it needs that it can't otherwise have, then the costs to group B are the price we pay for being universal. Otherwise, we should have stuck to US-ASCII, since after all, moving away from that is a pain. You can't have it both ways: if, as you admit, there are likely to be a fair number of people who will use Phoenician ... I have never accepted this position. I have seen no evidence that more than two or three people will use Phoenician. But that still means that some people will use it and confuse things for everyone else. It's just like Klingon. You and a few others wanted to use it. No one else did. But if it had been defined and your small group had started to publish widely with it, it would have made things more difficult for those who preferred Klingon in Latin script. For example, they would have to do double searches of the archives of Klingon publications for the articles they wanted. And we'd deal with it. I don't claim an overwhelming majority. But even if it is only four to three, that is still a majority. Four to three is an excellent reason to listen to the three. Or else we could all just take a vote and see if CJK or Latin should be the *only* alphabet we encode. After all, the others are just minorities. And you're telling me you're not being elitist? Listen to yourself. I have listened to the three, or mostly to one of the three (and a few people like you who support him but are not users) patiently and repeatedly for the last month or more. All I have heard are the same unconvincing arguments and appeals to his own authority. There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions and with interleaved collation, also encoding as variation sequences, but the only response I get amounts to No, because Phoenician is a separate script, because I say so and this is the right thing to do. So you're saying, then, that Some people *think* they need this, but they don't, so they can't have it? It's obviously not so completely clear, since there's plainly disagreement on the issue. I've studiously tried to give reasons beyond It's just different, deal; I'm sorry you haven't accepted them. In the end, though, it really *does* come down to whether or not you see it as a different script, and it's clear that that's a subjective judgement. Besides, this is hardly a representative sampling. I'm sure both sides could find more supporters; nobody's polled the entire pool of Semiticists in the world (and even if they had, as you said yourself, there are non-Semiticists who will use Phoenician--*and their needs must be considered too*). There is no reason to believe that the minuscule sample we've seen in any way reflects the actual division of opinion, except that we *can* assume that our informants do not speak only for themselves and thus there is at least some
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Patrick Andries Patrick dot Andries at xcential dot com wrote: I showed my 5 year old some Fraktur (lower case only) for the first time today. He is only just getting to grips with reading simple English words. And the verdict .. 'funny and silly' but he could still read the words back to me. Anecdotal perhaps but Dean, do you want me test the other 29 of his class at school before we can be rid of this fallacious Fraktur analogy? Try with Stterlin also unified within Latin ;-) That's handwriting, Patrick. Come on, you know better. I can't read my doctor's handwriting either, but it's unified with Latin. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
On May 25, 2004, at 11:25 AM, Doug Ewell wrote: That's handwriting, Patrick. Come on, you know better. I can't read my doctor's handwriting either, but it's unified with Latin. Are you *sure*? Maybe that's why you can't read it... :-) John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Peter Kirk wrote: As I understand it, what at least a number of Semitic scholars want to do is not to transliterate, but to represent Phoenician texts with Phoenician letters with the Unicode Hebrew characters, and fonts with Phoenician glyphs at the Hebrew character code points. In other words, to treat the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician as a font change, like the difference between Fraktur and normal Latin script. Will they be allowed to do that after a Phoenician block is defined, or will they not? Of course they will. If a few people encode a significant number of texts according to their preferences, this implies a corpus in mixed encodings, which is what I am trying to avoid. Is this an acknowledgment that their are at least a few people who would prefer to encode Phoenician text using Phoenician characters? If there is a one to one relationship from Phoenician to Hebrew characters, then it should be straightforward to convert any text encoded with Phoenician characters to Hebrew characters for those that want them that way. - Chris
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 22:41 -0400 2004-05-22, Mark E. Shoulson wrote: Non-scholars get to use Unicode too, and have a right to influence what gets in it. Just because the userbase isn't the people you thought it would be doesn't mean they don't count. Amen. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
At 06:02 +0200 2004-05-23, Jony Rosenne wrote: Since there are 22 letters with similar meanings and similar names, there is not much difference between transliteration and encoding in practice. Except legibility. I don't think the history of writing systems is going to help us here. There is no disagreement about the facts, just about their interpretation. Historical principles have influenced, and will influence, what gets encoded. That's part of the universality of the Universal Character Set. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
Elaine, it would be interesting to read Prof. Kaufman's opinion of why Phoenician should not be regarded as a distinct script (family). Can he be persuaded to publish his reasoning for UTC to consider? However despite the discussion of current techniques and preferences among scholars, the ONLY question here is whether 'Phoenician' counts as a distinct script as far as Unicode principles are concerned. If the proposal on the table is accurate and silence seems to imply it is If it does and is then standardise it as such and we can move on to the far more interesting and challenging question of how better to use computers to work with multilingual texts and source materials in ancient scripts and languages. For Unicode, implementation of Phoenician as a font switch for Hebrew as an alternative proposal fails at the first hurdle if, as is claimed by some here, modern Hebrew readers do not regard Phoenician fonts as valid Hebrew fonts (in the sense that an English/Latin reader would acknowledge older cursive and type styles as valid and readable, if sometimes odd and unfamiliar). At least thats how I read the arguments about unification. So this is an important issue to address in a counter-proposal, although not the only one. Bob Richmond Saqqara Technology From: E. Keown Saturday, May 22, 2004 11:14 PM Elaine Keown Tucson Dear James Kass: His posting as it appeared on the Unicode list was offensive. I thought Michael Kaplan did a fine job of responding to it. The posting on the Unicode list IS ENTIRELY MY FAULTI copied Prof. Kaufman's response off the ANE list and (really stupidly) put it onto the Unicode list Michael Kaplan pointed out to me that I really shouldn't have done that.he's right...I'm far too impulsive, and I have a bad temper. Prof. Kaufman chose to forgive me---really magnanimous, I thought--and wrote me back re stuff. I got hysterical--or perhaps I should say, continued to be hysterical--because I thought no one on the Unicode list was listening (even to Dean Snyder, a very serious expert) and I thought maybe you all would listen to Kaufmanhe does have the 2nd-largest Semitic database in the world at this point. it's not long now till June 15, Markham. Elaine __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70/year http://smallbusiness.promotions.yahoo.com/offer
Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
From: saqqara [EMAIL PROTECTED] For Unicode, implementation of Phoenician as a font switch for Hebrew as an alternative proposal fails at the first hurdle if, as is claimed by some here, modern Hebrew readers do not regard Phoenician fonts as valid Hebrew fonts (in the sense that an English/Latin reader would acknowledge older cursive and type styles as valid and readable, if sometimes odd and unfamiliar). At least thats how I read the arguments about unification. So this is an important issue to address in a counter-proposal, although not the only one. Personnaly I have some difficulties to read English text rendered with LTR Phoenician, but it's still recognizable that this is English and with little efforts I can read it, because the letter shapes are probably nearer from Greek and Latin than to modern square Hebrew (there are many arguments that show that RTL Phoenician is hard to read by modern Hebrew readers that may even think that it is a tweaked Latin font with a strange presentation)... There's probably no doubt that representative Phoenician glyphs shown in the Michael report are too far from Arabic or other Semitic or Indic script. My opinion here is that Phoenician would unify more easily with Greek or Coptic than with Hebrew... What is unique in Phoenician is that it has a weak directionality (can be written in either direction, although RTL is probably more common and corresponds to the most important sources of usage in old sacred texts from which semitic script familiess for Aramaic or Early Hebrew have genetic relations).
Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
Dean Snyder dean dot snyder at jhu dot edu wrote: Since you are the one trying to draw an analogy between Phoenician and Fraktur, in terms of demand for separate encoding, I think the burden is on you to prove that such a demand exists for Fraktur. Otherwise the analogy is pointless. I've never said there was a demand for it; I've only said that lot's of people would USE it if it were encoded. That is my opinion. Do you disagree that lots of people would use a Fraktur encoding? (Especially if we're using lots, as I am, in comparison to the number of people who we think would use separately encoded Phoenician.) I absolutely DO disagree with the premise that lots of people would use a separate Fraktur encoding. To my knowledge there has been no request for one, and no serious desire on the part of scholars or anyone else to encode Fraktur text separately from Antiqua text. I believe users would find it troublesome in the extreme to create a new encoding to represent German-language text where there has only been one before (unlike the apparent situation with Phoenician). Note, by the way, that I would really like to leave the Fraktur math symbols out of this discussion. They have always been presented by the standard as math symbols only, not to be used for normal text. The fact that people aren't in fact using them for normal text says more about adherence to the standard than about whether anyone would use a real Fraktur encoding. Dean later wrote: What I was trying to say, of course, was that, since Japanese and Fraktur were not separately encoded EVEN THOUGH there would have been lots of people who would use such encodings, a fortiori the far smaller number of potential Phoenician users should not be taken as decisive for its encoding. Again, there is this assertion that there would have been lots of people who would use a separate Fraktur encoding. Is this getting old yet? Dean, if you insist on using Fraktur as an example that Unicode does not separately encode script variants or font variants or diascripts (whatever that means) that lots of people would use, you must show some shred of evidence that lots of people would in fact use a separate Fraktur encoding. Does that make sense? Saying that is my opinion does not constitute evidence. Otherwise the analogy is pointless. How about: Since the digit 3 with flat top was not separately encoded from 3 with rounded top EVEN THOUGH there would have been lots of people who would use such an encoding, a fortiori the far smaller number of potential Phoenician users should not be taken as decisive for its encoding. Do you see how the absence of evidence that lots of people want flat-top 3 and round-top 3 encoded separately completely invalidates the premise? This is what you are doing by continuing to claim that lots of people would use a separate Fraktur encoding. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Re: Fraktur yet again (was: Re: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?)
I absolutely DO disagree with the premise that lots of people would use a separate Fraktur encoding. I would use it when transcribing works that mix Fraktur and Latin constantly, or when there's only a quote or a couple letters in Fraktur. Sure a lot of people would transcribe their texts into Latin, but I think it established that doesn't mean a script shouldn't be encoded, nor that people wouldn't use it. (Not that I actually encourage encoding Fraktur, but modern systems seem to lack the ability to switch between Fraktur and Roman fonts, like you switch between Roman and italic fonts. HTML doesn't even include a generic Fraktur font-type.) -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
RE: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dean Snyder I have brought up a multitude of different arguments over the past few weeks against this proposal. I certainly don't recall a multitude of different arguments from you, though perhaps I've gotten tired of hearing some things repeated so much I've missed them. Would you care to *summarize* all of your arguments (one or two lines each) so I and others can be reminded (or learn for the first time) just how many distinct points against the proposal you have made? Peter Constable
