Peter Kirk wrote:
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.
That's awfully elitist, isn't it? "Some *non*-scholars want it (if they'll embrace it, it follows that they'd want it if offered), but we can't be swayed by the desires of the hoi polloi." Non-scholars get to use Unicode too, and have a right to influence what gets in it. Just because the userbase isn't the people you thought it would be doesn't mean they don't count.
On 21/05/2004 06:22, saqqara wrote:
... Apparently, the majority view here and elsewhere seems to be that Phoenician is a distinctive script family. If so, then the only issues are those factual elements of Michaels proposal and there is no need to continue the discussion here of whether it is needed at all.
Actually, this is not the majority view, at least here. It is the repeatedly expressed view of one script expert, and a few others have supported him (although many of these know little about the script), but the number of those who have disagreed seems to be larger, and that includes most of the experts on Semitic scripts who have expressed an opinion.
And more elitism. And also inaccuracy. I note that you are pleased to count Michael Everson and everyone else together as "one script expert [(and his supporters)]." That's weak math for voting. What's more, we've heard from a few other people (e.g. S. George Khalaf) who support a separate Phoenician. And not a single Hebrew-reader I spoke to, native or not, could even conceive of Paleo-Hebrew being a font-variant of Hebrew. They found the proposition laughable.
I don't think the "majority vs. one or two malcontents" picture that you're drawing here is even vaguely reminiscent of reality.
~mark
