Peter Kirk wrote:
On 03/05/2004 05:19, Michael Everson wrote:
... Germans who don't read SÃtterlin recognize it as what it is -- a hard-to-read way that everyone used to write German not so long ago.
And modern Hebrews recognise paleo-Hebrew as a now hard-to-read way that
everyone used to write Hebrew a rather longer time ago.
No, they don't. Hardly any modern Hebrew-speaker even knows that there was *ever* an older form of the Hebrew alphabet (really, I've spoken to a lot of them). The ones I showed examples to thought it was some kind of trick or puzzle, like a bunch of strange designs and you have to figure out the pattern and work out what the next one should be, or something. Someone thought they were strangely-written numbers.
Show a SÃtterlin text to an English-speaker and the most clueless answer you'll get is "it's really lousy handwriting; I can't make sense of it." Not "it's a bunch of funny symbols."
~mark
