Peter Kirk wrote:
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Of course. And the point of Unicode is to move away from this situation of multiple encodings for the same script, by providing a single defined encoding for each one and properly defined conversion paths from legacy encodings.
Yes, for *each* one.
With Unicode, there will be no need to continue to encode Phoenician or Hebrew with 8-bit masquerading fonts and visual ordering (and yes, Michael, such things are a big problem and I agree that we should try to eradicate them), and it will be possible to convert texts to proper Unicode encoding. But if there are two competing Unicode encodings for the same text, and no defined mappings between them (as both compatibility equivalence and interleaved collation seem to have been ruled out), the advantages of going to Unicode are lost.
Even if there is no defined mapping between the two scripts, it won't be difficult to make one. Interleaved collation can be achieved creating and using a tailored collation table. There's no rocket science involved in doing this. Once person has created these they can share them with the community of Semitic scholars that has a need for them.
Why are you making these things out to be difficult? If you've no one else to do it, I volunteer to make a interleaved collation table for Phoenician & Hebrew and make a utility to trans-code from Phoenician to Hebrew - once Phoenician is encoded. These should take much less time write than your responses in this discussion.
- Chris
