On 24/05/2004 05:47, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
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We've been through this: it isn't about who's the majority. If the majority wants one thing and there is a significant *minority* that wants the other, Unicode has to go with the minority. Otherwise we'd just all stick with US-ASCII. Unicode is supposed to be universal, not a servant of the majority alone.
Well, I have two points here:
1) If a *significant* minority wants a proposal which doesn't have adverse effects on the majority, fine. But I question whether just two or three supporters is *significant* enough for a separate standard encoding rather than PUA.
2) If group A supports a proposal which will have *adverse* effects on group B, then, in my opinion, the proposal should only be accepted if group A is significantly larger than group B.
You can't have it both ways: if, as you admit, there are likely to be a fair number of people who will use Phoenician ...
I have never accepted this position. I have seen no evidence that more than two or three people will use Phoenician. But that still means that some people will use it and confuse things for everyone else. It's just like Klingon. You and a few others wanted to use it. No one else did. But if it had been defined and your small group had started to publish widely with it, it would have made things more difficult for those who preferred Klingon in Latin script. For example, they would have to do double searches of the archives of Klingon publications for the articles they wanted.
...
I don't claim an overwhelming majority. But even if it is only four to three, that is still a majority.
Four to three is an excellent reason to listen to the three. Or else we could all just take a vote and see if CJK or Latin should be the *only* alphabet we encode. After all, the others are just minorities. And you're telling me you're not being elitist? Listen to yourself.
I have listened to the three, or mostly to one of the three (and a few people like you who support him but are not users) patiently and repeatedly for the last month or more. All I have heard are the same unconvincing arguments and appeals to his own authority. There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions and with interleaved collation, also encoding as variation sequences, but the only response I get amounts to "No, because Phoenician is a separate script, because I say so and this is the right thing to do".
Besides, this is hardly a representative sampling. I'm sure both sides could find more supporters; nobody's polled the entire pool of Semiticists in the world (and even if they had, as you said yourself, there are non-Semiticists who will use Phoenician--*and their needs must be considered too*). There is no reason to believe that the minuscule sample we've seen in any way reflects the actual division of opinion, except that we *can* assume that our informants do not speak only for themselves and thus there is at least some support on both sides of the issue.
Agreed. Several people have tried to get broader input, but with little success because few on either side understand the issues.
I can't believe you're saying that four scholars vs. three scholars means we have to disregard the needs of the three; I'm completely flabbergasted by that.
I am not disregarding the needs of the three. But the three, or one of them, insist that the needs of four (and probably considerably more) must be disregarded, and won't even discuss mediating positions. And they aren't even the majority. I'm completely flabbergasted by that.
Anyway, didn't you yourself say that once you heard from Deborah Anderson, you saw that there was in fact a need for this, and that removed your objections to the proposal? Why the change of position?
Yes, you are right, I did say that. It is the continued bad arguments of those in favour of the proposal, "fanning the flames of argument by saying the same thing over and over again", which have made me reconsider, because I refuse to associate myself with their positions. Anyway, I don't think I ever accepted that Phoenician should be entirely separated from Hebrew, but I accepted that a good argument could be made for separate encoding with interleaved collation. That remains my position.
On 24/05/2004 06:09, James Kass wrote:
Well, if you asked the ancient Phoenicians this question, of course they would have said "yes" because the script used in their time for Hebrew was very similar to their own script. The change to square script took place only after the Phoenicians had more or less lost their identity in their original homeland, although it was still used for a few centuries in and around Carthage....
And we get back to the gist. Is it a separate script? Would it be fair to ask for documentation that the ancient Phoenicians who used the script considered it to be a variant of modern Hebrew? (No, it's
not a fair question at all. But, I think it's an appropriate question.)
Also, I'm having trouble understanding why Semitic scholars wouldn't relish the ability to display modern and palaeo-Hebrew side-by-side in the same plain text document. And, even if *all* Semitic scholars aren't jumping at the chance, why the heck would they want to prevent it?
Best regards,
James Kass
On 24/05/2004 06:17, Peter Constable wrote:
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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.
Thank you, Peter, for checking on these fonts, and for providing for us all the evidence that Michael was asking Dean for, that there does exist fonts with "Phoenician" glyphs for Unicode Hebrew characters. Very likely these font developers were simply confused by the licensing rules for Times New Roman.
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).
Well, these Ebionites are not scholars but a revival of an ancient sect somewhere midway between Judaism and Christianity. Of course scholars are free to use their fonts, if copyright permits.
So one thing which this does demonstrate is that there is a community of users other than scholars who are currently encoding paleo-Hebrew texts with Hebrew characters.
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);
But no one has answered my case about searching the Internet or other sets of texts from various sources.
- it is not difficult to convert data, or to make retrieval software
treat separately-encoded PH the same as Hebrew
If this is not difficult, will Microsoft provide such conversion or retrieval software, e.g. by supporting customised collation?
Good point. But of course this (alleged) person interested in Phoenician but not Hebrew will not be helped if more than one encoding is permitted for Phoenician. Anyway, this is a case where language tagging should be used rather than a separate script. We don't define separate scripts for Danish and Norwegian so that people can find one but not the other in a search.- 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.
Agreed. And we have now seen that not all non-Semiticists want separate encoding, for it is clear that the Ebionites at least 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.
On 24/05/2004 06:58, Michael Everson wrote:
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In any case we're encoding the significant nodes in your *diascript. Similarly, Swedish, BokmÃl, Nynorsk, and Danish are distinguished, as are the Romance languages.
They are not distinguished as scripts, only by language tagging. No one has objected to separate language tagging for Phoenician - although that is a potentially troublesome concept.
On 24/05/2004 07:23, Peter Constable wrote:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On
Behalf Of Mark E. Shoulson
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 5:47 AM
The fact that there are people who would be
served by it indicates that Unicode should provide it.
Careful, here: the fact that people would be served by it indicates that
UTC should *consider* providing it. But the further consideration is
whether those people can be served *without* it. If they would be served
by it and cannot be well served without it, *then* we conclude that UTC
should provide it.
Good point, Peter. No one has yet shown that anyone cannot be served *without* a separately encoded Phoenician script, only that a few people want it.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
