. Quoting from: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1308&letter=A
<quote> ... In the letter מ the original bent stem was curved upward still more until it reached the upper horizontal stroke, so that the final Mem to-day has the form ם. The Palmyrene script possesses a final Nun with a lengthened stem; the Nabatean contains similarly final Kaph, Nun, Ẓade, and Shin, and further a closed final Mem and final He. ... <end quote> So, apparently we have contextual forms which differ a bit between scripts. (Hebrew has final KAF, MEM, NUN, PE, and TSADI.) *** If ancient Hebrew and modern Hebrew were the same script, we wouldn't need the modifiers, we could just say "Hebrew" and everyone would know what we were talking about. *** The opening line from the Moabite Stone (Mesha Stele) could be expressed as "ANK MSO BN KMSMLD MLK MAB", but that's not a compelling argument in favor of unifying Phœnician and Latin. Likewise, the fact that some members of the user communities often transcribe such inscriptions into modern Hebrew is not a compelling argument in favor of unifying ancient and modern Hebrew. *** If it's perfectly acceptable to write old Aramaic using modern Hebrew glyphs, would the converse also be true? In other words, would it be perfectly acceptable to use old Aramaic glyphs along with cantillation marks and modern Hebrew points to represent the Bible? Or, would it be a travesty to do so? *** If referring generically to many of the Indic scripts won't float your boat, suppose we consider the Philippine scripts. Some of these are arguably glyph variants of each other, yet they were not unified. (Well, the punctuation was unified.) *** Referring to the 2311.PDF document, it should be noted that the phrase "Further research is required" is used twice in the short section on Aramaic. Michael Everson's submission doesn't strike me as "by gosh and by golly - this is how we're going to do it", but rather seems to be a preliminary report offering guidelines derived from respected sources. *** Ideally, input would be solicited from members of the user communities who have read Daniels and Bright (as well as other germaine publications) and who know something about computer encoding and the Unicode Standard. (smile) Rara avis. Best regards, James Kass .
