From: "John Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Michael Everson wrote: > > > Why, James, we gave evidence a month ago that the ancient Hebrews > > considered it to be a different script than the one they had learned in > > exile. > > To be fair, it isn't at all clear from your evidence that the Ancient Hebrews had the same > concept of 'script' as the Unicode Standard. I don't recall anything in what you cited > that suggested anything more significant than a recognition of a change in the style of > writing *the same Hebrew letters*, or as they might have said, if they did use Unicode > parlance, the same abstract characters.
Yes but it is significant that Phoenician letters have letters named a bit differently than Hebrew letters, even when refered to by Semitists! If they name the letters differently, it's a clear sign that they already consider the letters as distinct (also because they want to respect the sacred Hebrew alphabet by not naming with Hebrew names the Phoenician letters). If Semitists make distinctions, then this is an evidence that these are distinct _abstract_ letters. As Unicode encodes distinct abstract letters separately, the Michael's proposal has some sense. Now the fact that it is easy to tweak a Hebrew font to make it look like Phoenician, or to encode it with Hebrew is a technical aspect which does not change the fact that they are still distinct abstract characters. It was done simply because there was no other easy choice, and depending on authors some chose to tweak the Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabet found in the standardized encodings they also use everyday to work with modern texts. There's already a problem for the interchange of data encoded in visual order with tweaked Latin or Greek encoding, or in logical order with tweaked Hebrew encoding... With a single coherent Phoenician encoding, both semitists and Indo-Europeanists could exchange their texts using a common encoding which will be treated unambiguously as Phoenician and not as Latin or Hebrew (depending on who reads the rendered text)...
