Michael Everson wrote:
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.
To clarify: I was not positing this syllogism as a new argument, only seeking to express as succinctly as possible the underlying logic of the opposition to the Phoenician proposal. I don't think this logic is at all unreasonable, any more than I think many of the arguments in favour of the proposal are unreasonable.
Fine. The counter-argument was given, but it was deleted by you:
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
