Michael,
Michael Everson wrote:
At 10:22 -0700 2004-05-24, John Hudson wrote:
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.
All Hudson is pointing out is that long PRIOR to Unicode, Semitic scholars reached the conclusion all Semitic languages share the same 22 characters. A long standing and quite useful conclusion that has nothing at all to do with your proposal.
Why? Because that conclusion has NOTHING to do with how any Semitic language is represented in any script other than as transliteration.
What has happened is that conclusion has been brought into a Unicode discussion that does not share that viewpoint and in fact has its own criteria for encoding of scripts. Nothing more remarkable than that.
I took the gist of Hudson's post to simply be pointing out that some of the questions about your proposal arise from their proponents starting from an alien (in the sense of non-Unicode) point of view.
From that perspective, I think it was a quite useful observation and not a "Back to square 1." sort of comment. It illustrates why at least some fo the disagreement/opposition has arisen, which I think is a useful contribution.
To answer John's later question about what uses other Semitic scholars see for the Phoenician proposal, the ones that have been voiced to me include, grammars and other pedagogical materials, and more general publications. I think formal documentation is being prepared along those lines.
For some purposes, such as comparative analysis, the actual script of the original text is really secondary. But, for other purposes, such as those where the script in which a text is written is important, then preservation of that information is important. Really depends on the use to which you intend to put the encoded text.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
-- Patrick Durusau Director of Research and Development Society of Biblical Literature [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
