The following came in yesterday to the Ancient Near Eastern email list. Dean A. Snyder
---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ---------------- Subject: [ANE] Re: Phoenician Unicode Proposal: Expert Feedback Requested Date Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2004 7:37 PM From: Reinhard G. Lehmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hallo out there, I fully aggree with what has been said by Steven Kaufamn and Bob Whiting, and in my humble opinion Unicode Phoenician seems to be as superfluous as a Phoenician typewriter. But of course it does not hurt someone... Some expert feedback is requested - here it is: 1. Some of the figure tables shown in the proposal are outdated and obsolete - even Ifra used some outdated tables! 2. the names in the names list (p. 15) should be those of proper Ancient Hebrew, because we do not have original Phoenician letter Names (at least not their pronounciation) 3. The glyphs table page 14 are beautiful - like those of the Imprimerie nationale, which are, to be sure, Phoenician types cutted for the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum by famous script designers of the 19th century. Even Bodoni made a proposal (which had been rejected by the Academie des inscriptions et belles-lettres). They are *beauti*ful, and correct as abstraction of a certain stage of development in the Phoenician script - but I do not know for what they should be *use*ful. I myself would never use them, even for teaching, because students should not learn a certain 'polaroid' of a specialized Phoenician script, but the structures of that kind of Northwest Semitic linear alphabetic script and the general parameters and regularities of its Phoenician, South Canaanite (including Hebrew), and Aramaic branches of the first millenium BCE. 4. I have no idea what benefit should have the Unicode representation of several NWS regional handwritings like "font Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite, Punic, Neo-Punic, Phoenician proper, Late Phoenician cursive, Phoenician papyrus, Siloam Hebrew, Hebrew seals, Ammonite, Moabite, and Palaeo-Hebrew" - for example, what really *is* (or was) "Phoenician proper"? Byblos 10th century, Tyrus 6th?, Byblos 5th? Byblos 2nd? or Sidon 6th? What really is "Siloam Hebrew"? It is not a script type, but the hazarduous remnant of *only one single* inscription of only a few lines! What means "Hebrew seals"? Who ever studies the corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals should know that here is not a certain script of "Hebrew seals". Who knows exactly how Ammonite or Moabite or Edomite script has to look like? We only do know the different remnants of such a script in only few lines of several inscriptions from different locations and different times. 5. Figure 2, the Ahirom inscription, is - not late 11th century but later (I suggest 9th), as will be shown together with some new readings in a forthcoming edition. 6. Information in the introduction: a. The type described by Garbini as "very elegant script with long, slightly slanting vertical lines, minuscule loops and flat letters" is not the forerunner of Etruscan, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and so on, where this slanting vertical lines and minuscule loops are missing. The Ancient Phoenician script may be called the forerunner of the mentioned scripts, but this ancient Phoenician script is only represented in very few inscriptions, mainly from Byblos (Ahirom, Shipitbaal, Abibaal, Elibaal), and some arrowheads, which do not have slanting vertical lines at all. Arabic script is more developed from Nabataean, which developed Official Aramaic, which developed from Old Aramaic, which developed from Old Phoenician - but there was no Phoenician script with slanting vertical lines etc in between. b. Phoenician as described in the proposal p. 3 is *not* "quintessentially illustrative of the historical problem of where to draw lines in an evolutionary tree of continuously changing scripts in use over thousands of years", because Phoenician (script) itself is not only part, but product of this evolutionary process. c. The proposal says (p. 3 bottom) "Phoenician language inscriptions usually have no space between words; there are sometimes dots between words in later inscriptions (e.g. Moabite inscriptions)"... This is not true. Early Phoenician inscriptions know divinding dots or strikes, the *later* inscriptions do not. Moabite is not Phoenician Or otherwise all Canaanite linear alphabet scripts are to be considered Phoenician: but then it is wron to say that they "usually have no space between words". The scriptio continua is the end of development, not the beginning. Best regards Reinhard G. Lehmann ******************************************************** Dr. Reinhard G. Lehmann, AkOR Forschungsstelle f�r Althebr�ische Sprache und Epigraphik Fachbereich 02 Evangelische Theologie Johannes Gutenberg-Universit�t Mainz D - 55099 Mainz tel: (+49) 6131 - 39 23284 mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web-HP: http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/ look at: http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/link.html look at: http://www.uni-mainz.de/~lehmann/KUSATU-dframe.html ******************************************************** ----------------- End Forwarded Message -----------------
