> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Peter Kirk > Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 3:08 AM
> >> 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... > > More hearsay! Who has offered any evidence of this? No one. ... > > Well, Dean Snyder has been saying for some time that he wants the > difference between Hebrew and Phoenician to be a font change... The issue here is that what you say scholars want to do (viz. encode using Unicode Hebrew characters and display with PH glyphs) is already technically possible, and so if they *really do* want to do that, then it's not unreasonable to expect that they might have attempted to do so. But that would imply the existence of such fonts. So, if such fonts do not exist, it calls into question whether in fact the claim is true. (And if the only PH fonts have glyphs on Latin characters, then the only argument they could support would be an argument to unify PH with Latin! They otherwise demonstrate nothing except historical practice.) > And if you want evidence of use of corresponding glyph to code point > mappings for Phoenician/palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew fonts, looks at > the following: > http://www.historian.net/files.htm: set of various Semitic fonts > including Phoenician with the same mappings. All the fonts I looked at on this site used W Sem glyphs for Latin characters. > http://www.linguistssoftware.com/archaic.htm. These likewise appear to use Basic Latin characters. > http://members.tripod.com/~ebionite/fonts.htm: palaeo-Hebrew mapped as > "Web Hebrew", which is basically ISO 8859-8 visual. Now, these are an interesting hodgepodge. Five different fonts, one of the square Hebrew (so I'll consider only the others): Evyoni Palaeo: encodes PH in the Basic Latin range Evyoni Megawriter: encodes PH in the Latin-1 range (and an illegal rip-off of Times New Roman, btw) Evyoni Hebrew Encoded Palaeo, Evyoni TNRH PalaeoHebrew (two more illegal TNR derivatives): Ta da! These actually do encode PH glphs using Unicode Hebrew characters. So, what does this demonstrate? - There is clear evidence that some people want to encode PH glyphs using Hebrew characters. - It supports the claim that there are Semitic scholars who consider PH characters and square Hebrew characters to be the same characters, with glyph variants (but we already knew this because some of these people have already told us this is their view). - If Semitic scholars want to encode PH as Hebrew characters and display with a font that uses PH glyphs, they have at least two fonts at their disposal (but, oops!, they are illegal fonts, so if they have moral integrity they won't use these but will look for others). And what does this not demonstrate? - That there is no reason to encode Phoenician as a separate script. It provides support for that case, but does not make the case on its own. There are other factors, notably the needs of users *other* than Semiticists. The point has been made by the unification camp more than once that encoding PH text using characters other than Hebrew makes it harder for Semiticists to search for data. But these people have not adequately responded to the counter-arguments (and in so doing have not adequately acknowledged the needs of non Semiticists) that - they do not need to encode their texts any differently, and in fact in a given research project the people involved in the project will most likely manage their own data and make sure it is encoded in one way according to their preferences (they already have to normalize their data to deal with the encoded-as-Hebrew vs. encoded-as-Latin issue); - it is not difficult to convert data, or to make retrieval software treat separately-encoded PH the same as Hebrew - for the non-Semiticist interested in PH but not Hebrew, searching for PH data in a sea of Hebrew data (if they are unified) is all but impossible. I think we can stop debating whether anybody considers PH characters to be the same as Hebrew characters, of whether anybody wants to encode PH text using Hebrew characters and display it using fonts with appropriate glyphs. I also think we should stop debating whether Phoenician script is a distinct script from Hebrew script (talking about the script, not encoded characters): it is clear that there is disagreement and that opinions are not going to change. The facts are that some consider them the same, and that some do not. We do not need to debate which view is correct; what we need to do is consider how we respond to each of those points of view when it comes to developing character encoding standards and IT implementations. And those considerations must take into account the needs of all users: Semiticists, and non-Semiticists. Peter Constable
