Peter,
A longer response on related issues, probably by tomorrow but for now:
Peter Kirk wrote:
On 22/05/2004 14:04, James Kass wrote:
...
Well, we are now being assured that people who want to encode Phoenician, palaeo-Hebrew etc as Unicode Hebrew will be quite free to do so indefinitely even if Phoenician is encoded.
There is no such assurance. The actual assurance is more like
'people who wish to transliterate ancient scripts into modern ones
are perfectly free to do so'. Indeed, how could it be otherwise?
As I understand it, what at least a number of Semitic scholars want to do is not to transliterate, but to represent Phoenician texts with Phoenician letters with the Unicode Hebrew characters, and fonts with Phoenician glyphs at the Hebrew character code points. In other words, to treat the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician as a font change, like the difference between Fraktur and normal Latin script. Will they be allowed to do that after a Phoenician block is defined, or will they not? If the answer is that they will not, this justifies the objection that a new Phoenician block interferes with the work of the real experts in the field, in order to meet the not very clearly defined requirements of a few non-experts.
Can you answer the question: "On what basis do you think "a number of Semitic scholars" will not be able to continue their current practices if the Phoenician proposal is accepted?"
I have yet to hear any suggestion that they cannot continue their current practices. As far as I am aware, there are no Unicode police patroling the web or elsewhere.
And current practice includes, by the way, not solely to represent Phoenician with Unicode Hebrew characters, but to also represent it in Western transliteration. (Actually both are arguably transliteration but leaving that aside for the moment.)
The mixed corpus problem is a chimera and really irrelevant to the issue at hand. I would expect any reasonable project to pick a single solution and stick with it. Can use Unicode or transliteration but would be advised to convert to all of one to the other.
There are problems currently with using a single solution but that is in part a delivery problem and not something Unicode per se can address.
Hope you are having a great day!
-- Patrick Durusau Director of Research and Development Society of Biblical Literature [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
