Thank you for this helpful clarification - the whole posting
What ultimately is important is whether the *users* of a
Unicode encoding for Aramaic would be better served by
treating certain historical texts across SW Asia as variants
of Hebrew (or Syriac) and encoding them accordingly, or
better served by having a distinct character encoding to
represent those texts.
I don't think you can discover that by trying to analyze the script characteristics axiomatically.
The main reason for separately encoding Coptic, rather than maintaining what we now recognize to be a mistaken unification with the Greek script, is that it is less useful to people who want to represent Coptic texts to have it be encoded as a variant of Greek than it is to have it be encoded as a distinct script.
--Ken
I think that what might be helpful is to get an idea of how ancient scripts like Phoenician and Aramaic are represented in modern scholarly publications. I guess they are commonly transliterated. But when they are not, I wonder if they are represented by copies of actual ancient glyphs, or by the equivalent Hebrew or Syriac etc letters. Well, I don't have the answer immediately, but I may be able to find out. What I can tell you is that in the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon all Aramaic words, including those from inscriptions, are represented in Hebrew script. But so are ancient south Arabian inscriptions. But Arabic, Syriac and Ethiopic are represented in their own scripts, and Akkadian cuneiform is transliterated. But this work does of course have a bias towards Hebrew. this dictionary dates from 1906, so it hardly represents contemporary practice.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
