... My native script isn't Hebrew but I am certain that no one who was could easily read a newspaper article written in Phoenician or Samaritan letters.
Agreed (though my native script isn't Hebrew either) - excluding of course those who have made a special study of these scripts. But then the same would be true of black letter (Gothic) script for many English speakers.
But I don't think this would be true of the Palmyrene Aramaic shapes. They probably wouldn't appear in a newspaper. But if they were used in a modern handwritten letter, I think a Hebrew reader would be able to read them reasonably easily though he or she would think they are in strange handwriting.
And, to go back to the discussion of a couple of weeks ago, the same is even more true of biblical Hebrew. No Hebrew reader would have any trouble reading a newspaper in biblical Hebrew script copied direct from the classical (Masoretic) biblical MSS. Indeed the Unicode reference glyphs are practically identical to the ones in these MSS. So certainly no justification for a separate script there.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
