On 19/05/2004 20:54, John Hudson wrote:
Ernest Cline wrote:
I would be very surprised if there were such a cybercafe. One
that had both a Hebrew-Phoenican and a Hebrew-Hebrew font
with the Hebrew-Phoenician as the default would be much easier
to believe as a possibility. Still, it is a valid point. I think that if
Phoenician were to be unified with Hebrew, it would probably
behoove Unicode to establish variation sequences for Phoenician.
Even with a separate Phoenician script, it might be a good idea to provide variation sequences that could be used to identify different script styles such as Paleo-Hebrew and Punic in the plain text.
This is not a practical use of variation sequences if, by this, you mean use of variation selectors. What are you going to do, add a variation selector after every single base character in the text? ...
Well, this won't make the text any longer in UTF-16.
... Are you expecting fonts to support the tiny stylistic variations between Phoenician, Moabite, Palaeo-Hebrew, etc. -- variations that are not even cleanly defined by language usage -- with such sequences?
No one has suggested this. It does make some sense to encode the difference between Phoenician and Hebrew in this way, and possibly also other clearly definable distinctions. Presumably a line has to be drawn somewhere, but the whole concept cannot be rejected just because it could be taken to ridiculous extremes. Actually exactly the same argument could be made against Everson's proposal for Phoenician, that it opens the way to separate proposals for Moabite, Palaeo-Hebrew etc. But I am not making that argument because Everson has clearly stated that he does not intend to make these distinctions.
Some people seem keen on variation selectors in the same way that others are keen on PUA: as a catch-all solution to non-existent problems.
The solution may be a catch-all, but the problem is a real one. Dr Kaufman's response makes it clear that to professionals in the field Everson's proposal is not just questionable but ridiculous. There is certainly some PR work to be done in this area, not name-calling.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
