At 06:46 -0700 2004-05-22, Peter Kirk wrote:
Or are we to expect that as soon as Phoenician is encoded separately, the majority of Semitic scholars who have always opposed this will come under all kinds of pressure to use the encoded script which was added just to meet the requirements of a couple of people, one of whom is not even a Semitic scholar?
Semiticists do not "own" the Phoenician script. The Universal Character Set will encode the important writing systems of the world. Phoenician is one of these.
The fear is rather that a few people, who are not true Semitic scholars, will embrace the new range, and by doing so will make things much harder for the majority who don't need and don't want the new encoding. One of the original purposes of Unicode was to move away from the old situation in which many different incompatible encodings were used for the same language and script. We don't want to get back into that situation.
You are already in that situation. Phoenician texts are often written in Latin transliteration. I have dozens and dozens of examples. Written by honest-to-goodness real Semiticists, too.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
