On 24/05/2004 10:19, Michael Everson wrote:
At 08:41 -0700 2004-05-24, Peter Kirk wrote:
But if it had been defined and your small group had started to publish widely with it, it would have made things more difficult for those who preferred Klingon in Latin script. For example, they would have to do double searches of the archives of Klingon publications for the articles they wanted.
That is your unproved assertion, and ignores the fact that your precious databases and archives already include multiscript representation of the languages you study. This insistance that your work will be "damaged" by the presence of Phoenician code positions is as untenable as it was when you first made it.
I have not ignored the fact that there are already multiple representations. I have clearly stated that a major goal of Unicode is to move away from such multiple representations, and that the encoding of Phoenician should be chosen so as to facilitate that goal (if that's the correct jargon).
I have listened to the three, or mostly to one of the three (and a few people like you who support him but are not users) patiently and repeatedly for the last month or more. All I have heard are the same unconvincing arguments and appeals to his own authority.
I see the apology is rescinded too, and it is back to ad-hominem.
The apology is not rescinded. This is not ad hominem. I have heard unconvincing arguments from two or three people. Am I not permitted to mention that one of those people has appealed to his own authority as an acknowledged expert on writing systems in general? I do not question that authority and expertise, I just ask for it to be backed up by convincing arguments. Sorry for being repetitive, but I'm certainly not the only one, on either side of this discussion.
There is no consensus that this Phoenician proposal is necessary. I and others have also put forward several mediating positions e.g. separate encoding with compatibility decompositions
Which was rejected by Ken for good technical reasons.
I don't remember any technical reasons, it was more a matter of "we haven't done it this way before". But perhaps that is only because the need to do this has not previously been identified. However, I can make a good case for the new Coptic letters being made compatibility equivalent to Greek - which can still be done, presumably - as well as for similar equivalences for scripts like Gothic and Old Italic, and perhaps Indic scripts - which presumably cannot now be added for stability reasons.
and with interleaved collation,
Which was rejected for the default template (and would go against the practices already in place in the default template) but is available to you in your tailorings.
Again, a matter of "we haven't done it this way before".
also encoding as variation sequences,
Which was rejected by Ken and others for good technical reasons, not the least of which was the p%r%e%p%o%s%t%e%r%o%u%s%n%e%s%s% of interleaving Hebrew text in order to get Phoenician glyphs.
I don't like this one myself either. But I disagree on *preposterousness*. You consider this preposterous because you presuppose that these are entirely different scripts. Others consider it preposterous *not* to interleave Phoenician and Hebrew because they understand these to be glyph variants of the same script. For, as John Hudson has put it so clearly, for these people Phoenician and Hebrew letters are the same abstract characters, in different representations.
You wrote elsewhere of "A strong tradition of scholarship" which "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". I accept that there is such a tradition. But there is also "A strong tradition of scholarship", that of most Semiticists, which has precisely the opposite view. We all need to recognise that there is this genuine scholarly disagreement, and avoid emotive words like "preposterousness", and all the more "p%r%e%p%o%s%t%e%r%o%u%s%n%e%s%s%". And since neither side can claim a clear majority, we need to look for a mediating position which is reasonably acceptable to both sides. Three suggestions for this have been put forward. The main objection to two of them seems to be that they are novel. But novel problems need novel solutions.
but the only response I get amounts to "No, because Phoenician is a separate script, because I say so and this is the right thing to do".
It is a pity that the facts are not obvious to you. It is clear that you don't want Phoenician to be a separate script, and you grasp at straws trying to "make" an encoded Phoenician into Hebrew.
It is clear to me that Phoenician is *not* an entirely separate script. It seems to me that it comes somewhere between being the same script and being a separate one. (In other words, I don't entirely accept either of the strong traditions of scholarship.) Therefore complete separation is inappropriate, although I don't insist on complete unification. So I am looking for a technical solution which comes somewhere between these two extremes, which officially recognises the one-to-one equivalence between Phoenician and (a subset of) Hebrew while making a plain text distinction possible for those who wish to make it.
I am not disregarding the needs of the three. But the three, or one of them, insist that the needs of four (and probably considerably more) must be disregarded, and won't even discuss mediating positions.
The technical solutions you have proposed have been inadequate.
Can you suggest one which is more adequate? Or in fact are you determined to reject any solution, using doubtful technical arguments against the details because you have failed to produce convincing arguments against the principle?
...
But of course this (alleged) person interested in Phoenician but not Hebrew will not be helped if more than one encoding is permitted for Phoenician.
The kind of rhetoric you use is dishonest. "Alleged"? We have had the owner of http://www.phoenicia.org express his support.
I'm sorry. I didn't remember the specific point. I withdraw "(alleged)".
And we have now seen that not all non-Semiticists want separate encoding, for it is clear that the Ebionites at least do not.
I do not come to that conclusion from the analysis of that font.
Well, it is clear at least that their work will be complicated by separate encoding, because instead of two encodings for their texts they will have three to consider.
On 24/05/2004 15:08, Philippe Verdy wrote:
...
Yes but it is significant that Phoenician letters have letters named a bit
differently than Hebrew letters, even when refered to by Semitists!
The names are only slightly different, perhaps indicating different reconstructed pronunciations of the originally identically written names.
Different letter names do not imply different abstract characters. If they did, most of the French alphabet would have to be disunified from the English one.
...
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. ...
This is not a fact. It is a position held by some scholars but rejected by others.
On 24/05/2004 16:31, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
Unfortunately it requires a lot more than that. Because of decisions taken by the UTC in the past, conversion and display of MCW encoded text has become much messier than it might otherwise have been. That is Elaine's main point, I think. But I agree with Patrick D that it helps none of us to chew over old hurts and slights.... (re MCW encoded Hebrew data)
*Displaying* or *printing* such data then involves an interpreter of those conventions -- which might be as simple as an ASCII-encoded font hack.
... the issue of
whether the 22 basic Semitic letters can also be represented in
a Phoenician script or not pales to the minor molehill it actually
is, in my opinion.
Obviously a lot of people disagree with you on this one, Ken.
On 24/05/2004 20:25, Doug Ewell wrote:
Well, Phoenician and palaeo-Hebrew is all handwriting as well. There was no printing before the 15th century, and no computers until the 20th century. A lot of the variant glyphs which we see in ancient inscriptions, and especially in ancient correspondence preserved on papyri and ostraca, may well be the ancient equivalent of doctors' handwriting....
Try with S�tterlin also unified within Latin ;-)
That's handwriting, Patrick. Come on, you know better. I can't read my doctor's handwriting either, but it's unified with Latin.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
