At 09:21 -0400 2004-05-03, Patrick Andries wrote:
And REJECTED them as being a different script.
What does this mean ? How do you know how they felt ? Any differently from the Germans that rejected Suetterlin as different script, etc. ?
It means that they saw the script, knew it to be different from the one they were using, and specifically rejected its use.
I really don't know now to compress years of study on writing systems to a couple of words that you people can accept. Most of my arguments have been ignored anyway, or pooh-poohed because I'm apparently not expert enough to know how to unify or disunify scripts. Of course, there was N2311, published in 2001. Apart from some worries about what Late Aramaic might be and whether it is encodable it seemed to me (and Rick and Ken at least) that the taxonomy of unification we made was the best one, and that we should proceed. This we have done.
While I'm rather for the Phoenician proposal, I believe one has to stress structural differences and objective arguments rather than simply repeating « it's a different script ».
Good gods, Patrick, I have been doing this, and so have others like Ken and Rick and James. Square Hebrew has accrued to it an enormous typographical complexity, none of which applies to the scripts we propose to unify under Phoenician. It is false to suggest that fully-pointed Hebrew text can be rendered in Phoenician script and that this is perfectly acceptable to any Hebrew reader (as would be the case for ordinary font change).
I have referred to Latin font hacks as well as Hebrew ones. That one got ignored, of course, because it shows the Hebrew font-hack argument to be flimsy.
And frankly, I don't consider that Snyder or Kirk or Cowan speak for the Semiticist community as they would have us think.
Square Hebrew as encoded in the Unicode Standard is a beast unto itself. John Cowan's wish for a generic 22-letter West Semitic Abjad may be all very well and good, but Hebrew is much more than that, and it is not sensible to pretend that it isn't.
I could quote Ada Yardeni (Book of Hebrew Script, British Library/Oak Knoll 1997) or Naveh, or Faulmann, or Taylor, or any one of the dozens of books on writing systems which we've used to get to where we are. I'm not at home right now, though, and all I could really do is say, go, study, learn what I have. I have been writing on this topic for three days now, and I have said more than repeating "it's a different script".
It's a different script, though. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
