Philippe Verdy wrote:
Let's keep Hebrew clean with only modern Hebrew and traditional pointed Hebrew... The religious traditions in Hebrew are too strong to allow importing into it some variants and marks coming from separate Phoenitic branches used by non-Hebrew languages.
The 'religious traditions' in Hebrew are specific to the *letters* (sometimes, incorrectly, identified as the 'consonants') of the Torah, i.e. to those letters that, at the time of the writing, were identical to those used for Aramaic, Moabite, Phoenician, etc. Vocalisation marks are a later convenience, and the existence of multiple pointing systems in Jewish use is evidence that, in religious terms, marks are unimportant.
Again, I am not opposing the encoding of 'Phoenician': I just want to see the real issues resolved. To my mind, there is essentially only one major issue in encoding the ancient North Semitic script separately from Hebrew: how should users encode Palaeo-Hebrew texts? With the new codepoints, or with the Hebrew codepoints? The text is Hebrew, but the appropriate glyph forms are ancient North Semitic. I do think there is the possibility of significant confusion, which is not grounds for refusing to encode the ancient North Semitic script, but does suggest that a specific recommendation should be made, either in the TUS or by an appropriate and representative scholarly body.
John Hudson
--
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I often play against man, God says, but it is he who wants
to lose, the idiot, and it is I who want him to win.
And I succeed sometimes
In making him win.
- Charles Peguy
