Doug, thanks for making this new point re ancient Semitic scripts. Fundamental identity of the characters is a strong reason for unifying these scripts as well as Han scripts. As I wrote a few days ago, ALEF is ALEF is ALEF is ALEF, whatever glyph shapes are used.
And ALPHA and A, are just the same.
We disunified Nuskhuri from Mkhedruli, and familiarity and legibility were indeed criteria for the disunification. Mark Shoulson has just given his expert testimony that, one-to-one relation to the Semitic repertoire or not, Samaritan needs to be considered different from Hebrew. I'd say he'd probably feel the same about the older Phoenician as well.
I will say it again: You and every Semiticist specialist on the face of the earth can encode every Phoenician document transliterated into Hebrew script in your databases and never even look at an eventually encoded Phoenician script. That usage still doesn't mean that the Phoenician script is a glyph variant of square Hebrew even if they share a repertoire.
Even in antiquity these scripts were used distinctively in a number of instances, which will be discussed in the proposal documents in due course.
Scripts develop, and differentiate. The nodes of Semitic which we will encode have not all been investigated, but, like Indic, it makes sense to encode more than one of them. I believe that the distinction between Phoenician and Square Hebrew should be maintained in plain text; font markup is not sufficient.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
