Indeed. Here are parts of my reply to Philippe on the Hebrew list:For me two scripts that are different enough so that a text written
in one script will have imprecise matches in another, and will be
hardly recognizable by readers is a candidate to a separate encoding,
because it starts its own family of supplementary letters specific
to some families of languages needing these extensions.
On this basis it could be argued that fraktur / black letter should be encoded separately from latin.
- Chris
There are no distinctive features other than glyph shapes distinguishing Hebrew, Phoenician, Samaritan and "Early Aramaic" as proposed in http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2042.pdf - apart from the pointing added later to Hebrew and Samaritan.
[to the suggestion that "a text written in one script will have imprecise matches in another":] This does not apply to the Semitic scripts, which have a precise one to one mapping.
If unrecognisably different glyph shapes alone are sufficient to justify encoding separate scripts, I will propose several new scripts e.g. black letter Latin, italic Cyrillic, cursive modern Hebrew, Nastaliq Arabic (actually the evidence on the bidi list today gives a much stronger case for this being encoded as a separate script), three separate Syriac styles, etc etc. And then there are scripts which have been rejected as ciphers, on the basis that they differ from existing scripts only in glyph shape.
(Although I did later say off list that these new script proposals were not to be taken as a serious threat!)
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
