Dean Snyder a �crit :
But the proposal also says, I believe somewhat contradictorily, in the technical section:
"4a. The context of use for the proposed characters (type of use; common
or rare)
Phoenician script is proposed to unify Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite, Punic, Neo-Punic, Phoenician proper, Late Phoenician cursive, Phoenician papyrus, Siloam Hebrew, Hebrew seals, Ammonite, Moabite, Palaeo-Hebrew."
Doesn't that sound stronger, almost like a recommendation?
I had the same feeling. This is almost a recommandation. And I prefer it as such: at least this would be clear.
I'm not opposed to encoding Phoenician. In fact, I'm rather for the inclusion of a Phoenician block (selfishly to support Punic and Neopunic) except for the possible confusion that may apparently occur by having two possible concurrent ways of representing Paleo-Hebrew texts.
In making a decision, as I mentioned before, one may want to take some care in trying to contact the user community and attempting to see if the introduction of Phoenician may disrupt already encoded Paleo-hebrew texts. Is there a lot of Paleo-Hebrew texts out there ? Encoded with the Hebrew block ? If not this maybe a red herring
A clear guideline for Paleo-Hebrew would be welcome I think : is the Phoenician block the preferred way to encode Paleo-Hebrew or the Hebrew block(*) ? I don't see the advantage of not answering the question and encoding Hebrew texts (not transcribing Paleo-Hebrew texts) in two different fashions, this will make searching and analysis of these texts more complicated. A clear guideline either way is better than leaving people without one. Obviously, even with this guideline, people will still be able to translitterate/transcribe in whatever other block they wish (the Latin block for instance) but at least the standard would standardize what is not perceived as translitteration. As far as I can see the enabling technology would then be the wide array of fonts that may be used with standardized or preferred codepoints.
P. A.
(*) It seems clear to me that, for some, the Paleo-Hebrew Script (Script as in Fraktur Script not a Unicode block) is just a nice stylistic difference to the Modern Square Hebrew (" we use Palaeo-Hebrew script. Palaeo-Hebrew has been used in the past to archaize , that is, to preserve a link to an earlier state of things. That is after all, what we are about, so Palaeo is the perfect script for us to use.", http://ebionite.org/fonts.htm).
