on 2004-05-02 16:26 Michael Everson wrote:
Children learning about the history of their alphabets
I've been following this discussion off and on, and figured I didn't have much to add, but I can relate to this remark. I was a child, once, and I had a fascination with scripts and languages that has continued to the present day. Although I have never been more than a dilettante in these fields, I'd like to think that what knowledge I have has positively influenced my long career as a botanist and my more recent career as a web developer.
In an eighth-grade English class (I was around 14 years old), I wrote a short story about the ancient inhabitants of Palestine. (It was intended to be humorous, in the ways of 14-year-old boys.) In that story I included fictional place names written in what would fit into Michael's Phoenician block (I believe they were some sort of ancient Canaanite, if not Phoenician sensu stricto).
I never progressed in my knowledge of Semitic scripts until a couple of years ago, when my daughter wanted a tattoo that said "peace" in Aramaic, and I researched enough to realize that Estrangelo Edessa wasn't likely to have been used to write Aramaic in the time of Jesus.
And with these bits of knowledge, I have been able to follow the outlines of the discussion.
If Unicode Phoenician had been around when I was 14, I would have used it.
-- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
