saqqara a �crit :
Unification of the Phoenician script with Hebrew would certainly eliminate some short term problems - the Hebrew script is fairly well supported nowadays among applications and we'd eliminate the Plane 1 issue. Terribly confusing to users however - the majority do not read Hebrew and we'd be back to hacks to prevent modern Hebrew fonts sneaking in. Unicode is not meant to be purely about fixing short term problems, rather a platform for moving forward.
If many Israelis may not be able to read Phoenician or Neo-Punic, it is not obvious to me that Phoenician or Punic scholars -- presumably the intended users of Phoenician/Canaanite -- do not read Square Hebrew. I have some testimony to the opposite : Lionel Galand (Tifinagh expert) saying he has often seen Punic inscriptions represented using Square Hebrew characters, James F�vrier (Punic expert) illustrating the Phoenician character names with Square Hebrew glyphs (and not Phoenician glyphs used in the previous pages), Dictionnaire de la civilisation ph�nicienne et punique <http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2503500331/171-9944786-8511424> unifying Aramaic, Square Hebrew and Phoenician in its initial transliteration table and illustrating the 22 letters with Square Hebrew glyphs, etc.
This may have been due to technical reasons (easy availability of Square Hebrew fonts), but it looks like Punic scholars are able to read Square Hebrew fonts.
P. A.
