At 06:35 -0700 2004-05-14, Peter Kirk wrote:
But there is an exceptional issue within the family of north-west Semitic scripts, which may apply also to others e.g. Greek, Coptic and archaic Greek - possibly also the Indic scripts.
I don't think so.
Within these sets of scripts there is NO ambiguity about which characters correspond to which, as they have identical repertoires, with possibly additional letters in some of the scripts for which no equivalent can be defined in the other scripts.
That doesn't mean that an ordered list with them interfiled is in any way legible.
For such cases, in my opinion, a good case can be made for interfiling the scripts in the default algorithm.
I disagree.
The major advantage of doing this is to allow integrated searching of text corpora in which texts have been encoded in more than one script.
As I keep saying, Phoenician-language texts are already encoded in Hebrew script and in Latin script, so this "advantage" is already excluded.
If the Unicode staff are now saying that it is OK to write Phoenician either with Hebrew characters masquerading as Phoenician or with the proposed Phoenician block, that opens the way to perpetuation of the confusion which existed before Unicode.
Before Coptic was disunified from Greek, all you could do was use Greek (or PUA) code points for the Coptic; that is one of the costs of disunification. The same goes for the Nuskhuri/Mkhedruli disunification.
It really would be far better, in the long run, if you said openly that anyone who continues to write Phoenician with Hebrew characters after the new block is accepted is wrong and breaking the standard, and should change their practices immediately.
Currently, Phoenician fonts I have seen have *all* been Latin-based, not Hebrew, but I personally believe it would be correct to encode Phoenician-language texts in Phoenician script with the Phoenician-specific code points (unless you want to transliterate it into Hebrew or Latin or Syriac or whatever).
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
