There are a number of reasons why things are on the Roadmap.
One is current use by living communities.
One is current use by specialists.
One is current use by non-specialists enthusiasts and generalists.
One is the traditional separation of writing continua into nodes of the tree of the world's writing systems.
One is simple recognizability and legibility; it is this that *informs* the traditional analysis by scholars of writing systems described above.
Normally a script has an aggregate of these reasons.
A number of people have been trying to twist arguments in order to "invalidate" them and to trick us into saying that black is white. Peter Kirk and Dean Snyder in particular are grasping at straws trying to chip away at the mass of evidence that put things on the Roadmap in the first place. It is an exercise in futility on their part.
What Patrick Durusau said is perfectly correct:
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 [which] 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.
In my view, the argument that Phoenician is to Hebrew as Fraktur is to Latin is ignorant, rather *embarrassingly* ignorant, of the historical relationships both of the development of the Semitic scripts on the one hand, and of the Latin script and the typographic and manuscript relationship of between Roman and Fraktur (and indeed Gaelic) on the other. Snyder's example "proving" that his mother couldn't read Fraktur in ALL CAPS only shows that he doesn't know what he is talking about. Goethe and Schiller couldn't have read that text with any ease either. Arguments about S�tterlin are likewise ignorant. The "legibility argument" is one of the things that scholars of writing systems for the past two centuries have used to classify the world's writing systems. As an heir to the legacy of their work, I use it to help to encode scripts in the Universal Character Set, for everyone in the world.
Arguments about Klingon have been equally vapid, should that need to be stated.
We have spent a month on this issue. Snyder and Kirk have not produced either technical or political arguments which suggest that the unified Phoenician script should be unified with the Square Hebrew which has been encoded already.
As Peter Constable has pointed out, Dean Snyder has already yielded the argument:
I think all acknowledge a demonstrated desire by some to distinguish the two [PH and square Hebrew] in plain text, but I and others have suggested that that desire should be weighed against the added complexity for text processing that a new encoding will introduce.
We have heard your arguments. We have weighed them. Unification has lost. I believe that it is a foregone conclusion that Phoenician will be sent for ballot, though of course the UTC and WG2 could decide otherwise.
As far as I'm concerned, that's about the end of the discussion. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
