At 15:14 -0700 2004-05-22, E. Keown wrote:
I got hysterical--or perhaps I should say, continued to be hysterical--because I thought no one on the Unicode list was listening (even to Dean Snyder, a
very serious expert) and I thought maybe you all would listen to Kaufman....he does have the 2nd-largest Semitic database in the world at this point.
No Semiticist is going to convince me that Phoenician is a font variant of Hebrew. Ever. The history of writing systems says otherwise. That is *my* expert opinion.
Whether Semiticists want to transliterate everything into Hebrew or Latin in their databases is their business. I fully support their efforts.
What "problems" people like Dean imagine will occur if they are googling for Phoenician documents, well, it's just not serious. Many texts exist in Latin transliteration, and the problems of the representation of ALEF and AYIN in Latin transliteration are worse than any problem anyone would ever have with poor li'l Phoenician.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
