D. Starner wrote at 8:37 PM on Monday, May 3, 2004: >I mean, maybe you're right and Phonecian has glyph forms too far from >Hebrew's to be useful ...
I thought it might be useful, even for those who are relishing the "immunity of the ill-informed" with regard to West Semitic scripts, to provide sample images of just what sort of glyph differences we are talking about as we discuss Phoenician, Old Aramaic, Imperial Aramaic, Old Hebrew, post-exilic Hebrew, Samaritan, medieval and modern Hebrew. The attached chart focuses on Hebrew consonantal script development (archaic, post-exilic, medieval, & modern), but includes some listings of related "diascripts". As this chart shows, the real break in Hebrew glyph shapes came with the post-exilic adoption of Aramaic forms (samples 7 - 12). [An aside: Not having taken the time to learn it, I find modern cursive Hebrew, with no separate encoding (nor should there be), to be practically illegible.] Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
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