Michael Everson scripsit:
> Scholarship seems to have proved it, whether or not you believe it.
Well, we have heard about part of the dispute.
From where I sit the burden of proof is on thosewho make these claims about what Semiticists are doing.
I don't see how it follows at all. Because Greek derives from Phoenician, unifying Square Hebrew with Phoenician is unjustifiable? How's that? The undistributed (or rather nonexistent) middle term is glaring.
I don't know what a "distributed middle term" is. In Unicode, we have used historical principles in our work. That is what was done in N2311
> The Phoenician scripts have completely different glyphs, are notrecognized as anything like legible Hebrew.
Suetterlin.
Oh shut UP about Sütterlin already. I don't know where you guys come up with this stuff. Sütterlin is a kind of stylized handwriting based on Fraktur letterforms and ductus. It is hard to read. It is not hard to learn, and it is not hard to see the relationship between its forms and Fraktur. Its existence is not the same kind of historical relationship that Phoenician letterforms have to Hebrew letterforms. People have letters in their attics written by their grandfathers in Sütterlin. You can buy books to teach you how to learn Sütterlin. Germans who don't read Sütterlin recognize it as what it is -- a hard-to-read way that everyone used to write German not so long ago.
Phoenician script, on the other hand, is so different that its use renders a ritual scroll unclean. If you ask me, who shall I believe, John Cowan who has a structural theory or the contemporary users of Phoenician/Palaeo-Hebrew vs Aramaic/Square-Hebrew in determining whether the scripts are unifiable or not, I shall believe the contemporary users, who considered the scripts anything BUT unifiable.
Well, it would be embarrassing to say just which Indic script would be best unified with Brahmi, which *may* be an argument for not unifying it. But Greek doesn't belong in this comparison: it *would* be absurd to unify an alphabet with an abjad, with or without vowel points.
Specious argument. Yiddish is written alphabetically.
> And your view that it's acceptable totake pointed and cantillated Hebrew text and display it with BOXES when displaying it with Phoenician glyphs is quite astonishing.
That was never my view. You asked me what I thought would be likely to happen in such a case: I replied, in effect: ideally, the marks would disappear (become zero-width glyphs)
What? No chance. On Mac OS for instance, if the font didn't have glyphs, they would be substituted from a Hebrew font which did or with the Last Resort Font.
more likely, they would appear as boxes. That's a claim about what would probably happen, not what should happen. I would make a similar claim if you asked me what would happen if LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q were followed by dagesh.
But a LATIN CAPITAL Q is a letter in a different script. If you unify PHOENICIAN QOP with HEBREW KOP (because, according to you, Phoenician is just a font variant of Hebrew) it will be reasonable for people to expect the right Hebrew behaviours, such as display.
Either way, pointed and cantillated text displayed in a Phoenician font is a JOKE at best. And not a very good one.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
