...
My own unscientific gut instinct is to be sympathetic to encoding "dead"
ancient scripts separately even when they are related since valuable historic
information may be conveyed simply by the fact a manuscript is written in one
script or another. That information, which granted may be of more importance
to palaeographers and epigraphers than to philologists, is no longer so
apparent when that document is encoded in another script.
That information can be encoded far more compactly in a single character or markup item. Anyway, palaeographers and epigraphers are likely to need to work with images, not plain text or even marked up text. For philologists, and for general readers, unifying the scripts is much more convenient. And "general readers" is not a joke, most epigraphic NW Semitic could be read easily by the Hebrew speaking general public if presented with modern glyph shapes.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
