Mark Davis scripsit: > - There is a cost to deunification. To take an extreme case, suppose > that we deunified Rustics, Roman Uncials, Irish Half-Uncial, Carolingian > Minuscule, Textura, Fraktur, Humanist, Chancery (Italic), and English > Roundhand. All often very different shapes. Searching/processing Latin > text would be a nightmare. > > - There is also a cost to unification. To take an extreme case, suppose > we unified Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew (after all, > they have a common ancester). Again, nightmare. > > So there is always a balance that we have to strike, looking at each > situation carefully and assessing a number of different factors.
All this should become a UTC policy, IMHO. > After all, it *is* unifying as it says "Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite, > Punic, Neo-Punic, Phoenician proper, Late Phoenician cursive, Phoenician > papyrus, Siloam Hebrew, Hebrew seals, Ammonite, Moabite, Palaeo-Hebrew", > but not unifying these with modern Hebrew (and I'm not sure where the > cut-off point in the history of Hebrew is). The Babylonian Exile, basically, but this particular cutoff is not arbitrary. Square (modern) Hebrew script isn't the direct descendant of Palaeo-Hebrew: there was a break in transmission, and the new glyphs were borrowed from Aramaic script. It's analogous to the use of Antiqua in modern German: it's not a descendant of Fraktur. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ccil.org/~cowan Female celebrity stalker, on a hot morning in Cairo: "Imagine, Colonel Lawrence, ninety-two already!" El Auruns's reply: "Many happy returns of the day!"
