Ernest Cline wrote:
It's a nice try, but Paleo-Hebrew isn't a transitional form. Glyphically, it's firmly on the "Phoenician/Old Canaanite" side of the equation, not resembling Aramaic-style square letters. Naveh says that the old Canaanite alphabet gave rise to three lines: Phoenician was its direct descendent, and developed at what seems a natural pace for a script to evolve. Aramaic evolved at an extremely rapid rate, changing its shapes dramatically in comparatively little time. Hebrew developed very slowly, hardly changing at all.How about the following:
When deciding how to encode ancient scripts in Unicode, sometimes arbitrary distinctions must be made between scripts that had a continuous evolution from one form into another. Depending upon the point of view of the author, a text written in a transitional form, such as Paleo-Hebrew, might be encoded in Unicode as either of the two scripts that it serves as a bridge between, in this case, Phoenician and Hebrew.
So the "transitional" forms are more to be found in Aramaic texts: if you're distinguishing by shape, Paleo-Hebrew is definitely not transitional.
~mark
