Michael Everson wrote at 3:08 AM on Thursday, May 13, 2004:At 21:34 -0400 2004-05-12, John Cowan wrote:
Remember that "Phoenician" in this context includes Palaeo-Hebrew, an we *have* seen evidence that this script is mixed with Square in the same text, though not in the same word.
Remember that we have likewise seen Greek text with the Palaeo-Hebrew text embedded in it in exactly the same way, yet we do not propose to interfile Phoenician with Greek.
Michael, your response exhibits faulty analogies and fundamental misunderstandings of the issues involved.
Bollocks it does, Dean.
(At the very simplest level you are confusing language and script.)
Ordered lists are language-independent. It is the script which is ordered, not the language.
You, or no one else here, have ever answered my objections based on the analogy of Fraktur/Roman German to Palaeo/Jewish Hebrew.
Because they aren't analogous.
This response also exhibits a complete ignoring of my Dead Sea scrolls scenario, where both "scripts", Palaeo-Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew,
You don't need to use the quotation marks. They are both different scripts. In fact if you would just accept this, your difficulties would fade away.
occur side by side FOR THE SAME TEXTS IN THE SAME LANGUAGE.
In DIFFERENT SCRIPTS.
Maybe you don't want scholars to intercollate this material?
I don't care. If scholars want to tailor an ordering so that they can interfile Georgian and Pahawh Hmong it is fine with me. Nothing prevents them from doing so.
How can you and others keep on ignoring these serious objections, and railroad this proposal through in spite of substantive resistance?
Because the objections are based on faulty analogies and fundamental misunderstandings of the issues involved?
I note here, for example, Ken Whistler's recent pre-supposition that this proposal will be adopted - "Phoenician (~ Old Canaanite, or whatever we end up calling it)". In light of these kinds of foregone conclusions by respected members of the Unicode Consortium, what else can we POSSIBLY do to stop this proposal's adoption?
Nothing. Embrace the inevitable.
If the UTC encodes Archaic Greek and does not encode Phoenician, it will make both Classicists and Semiticists happy.
Nope. Archaic Greek can be properly unified with Greek. Phoenician, on the other hand, cannot be properly unified with Hebrew, because we are going to encode important nodes of the family tree. We're going to do this because the Universal Character Set is a cultural artifact for everyone, not simply a tool for certain kinds of scholars.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
