saqqara wrote:
I'm genuinely interested in why Phoenician should not be regarded as a separate script but have yet to read a reasoned response to earlier posts.
I think the view may be most succinctly expressed in this way:
The numerous and visually varied 22-letter semitic writing systems all represent the same 22 abstract characters.
The Unicode Standard encodes abstract characters.
Ergo, only one set of codepoints is required to encode the 22-letter semitic writing systems.
Oh, goody. Back to square 1.
Except that Semitic writing should not be handled differently from any other writing system. The same analogy can be made for many the Brahmic scripts, of course, since the *abstract* structure KA KHA GA GHA NGA runs true for so many of them. We could have unified the Philippine scripts, which are *very* similar. But we didn't. And we *did* use visual variation as a significant criterion which distinguishes these scripts. A Sanskrit text *can* be transcoded 1:1 between many of these scripts.
A strong tradition of scholarship considers Phoenician to be antecedent to a number of scripts, including Greek and the form of Aramaic which gave rise to Square Hebrew (which has given rise to a great typographic tradition of its own). That tradition does not consider all of these numerous and visually-varied 22-letter Semitic writing systems to be abstract glyph variants of a single underlying structure. It distinguishes them clearly in the same "some of these things are not like the others" way that is a criterion for plain text representation, certainly for the group of scholars -- and educators and other enthusiasts -- which makes this distinction.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
