http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/index.htmlGlancing through these roadmaps I came across proposals for Aramaic, Samaritan and Phoenician. These alphabets look to me like glyph variants of the Hebrew alphabet. In fact the regular Hebrew alphabet, as in the reference glyphs, was originally an Aramaic alphabet very like the Aramaic one in the proposal. This replaced the "old" Hebrew alphabet used before in inscriptions from the 6th century BCE, and occasionally later, which looks much more like Phoenician as proposed.
So those charts are always a good place to start checking when wanting to know what the status of some obscure script might be in Unicode.
Some parts of the Hebrew Bible are actually in the Aramaic language, but in exactly the same script as the Hebrew parts.
So is there a real justification for separate alphabets here?
On the other hand, I did find a separate use for the Samaritan letter shin. This is used in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere as a text critical symbol, denoting the Samaritan Pentateuch, a variant form of part of the Bible.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
