On 26/05/2004 14:50, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Thank you for reminding me of this technical argument, although I am not convinced that it was ever made clearly before during this debate. Well, where are the mixed-script documents in this case?Peter Kirk scripsit:
So I have an honest question. Can anyone, please, remind me of any technical arguments other than legibility for the separate encoding of Phoenician?
The same as the general argument for separating any two scripts: the desire to create plain-text documents which contain combinations of them. We do not identify Greek with Coptic any more because Michael was able to find mixed-script documents that the UTC agreed would deserve plain text representability.
The only such documents I have seen involve representations of the divine name in Palaeo-Hebrew characters in otherwise square Hebrew texts. Well, representation of the Hebrew divine name is a very interesting subject which Mark Shoulson has gone into in some detail. He made a proposal in 1998, http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1740/n1740.htm, and has recently been considering revising and resubmitting it, as discussed on the Unicode Hebrew list. Should the UTC accept the principle of encoding all of these variants as distinct plain text? I would be surprised if that idea is accepted (and it is not what Mark was proposing). The ancient practice of writing the divine name in Palaeo-Hebrew is simply an early example of this kind of special rendering of the divine name. As such it should be treated either as the regular letters yod-he-vav-he with special markup for a Palaeo-Hebrew font, or else as a glyph variant of the special divine name character which Mark was proposing.
Of course I can easily use this example of the divine name in Palaeo-Hebrew as an argument for unification of the scripts. Peter Constable wrote a few hours ago:
As I understand him, he would see use of Palaeo-Hebrew words in a square Hebrew document as evidence that the two varieties of writing are "font" variants and not distinct scripts.If they were considered "font" variants, then you might expect to see different documents using one or the other, or see different elements within a single document using one or the other.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
