Peter Constable wrote:
That question has been answered. So far, the responses to the answers provided haven't been exactly deafening. Does nobody in the pro-unification camp have any response? Is nobody willing to give acknowledgement to the problems presented?
My response was to ask what need there was for plain-text in the circumstance in which the plain-text distinction was identified as a 'need'. The only response I received back was John Jenkin's 'What if someone were trying to read their Hebrew e-mail at an Internet cafe that only had a Palaeo-Hebrew font installed?' hypothesis. Aside from the sheer unlikeliness of this, this threw the discussion back on the legibility criterion, but I'd really like to know what prompts other users of 'Phoenician' to *need* a separate encoding. I understand that some people may *want* a separate encoding, but I have not yet seen a *need*, i.e. something that requires a distinction in plain-text. And I would like to see such a need clearly explained, with material examples, because then we could stop arguing until Michael submits his next semitic script proposal.
The concern I have is not so much with the Phoenician encoding per se, but with the encoding of 'significant nodes' -- to use Michael's phrase -- on a script continuum. While this might make sense to scholars dealing with isolated atomic instances of that continuum, it is not going to make sense to scholars dealing with the continuum as a whole, for whom the structural identity of the 'diacripts' within the continuum is much more important than their visual dissimilarity at specific places and times. There are 'technical issues' -- in the same sense that there are technical issues prompting some people to want a separate Phoenician encoding, i.e. usage issues -- that arise in trying to do scholarly work in a script continuum that is variously encoded as multiple scripts. These issues may not be sufficient to overcome the conflicting 'needs' of other scholars, but they should not be ignored on that basis. In particular, if Unicode encodes a number of 'significant nodes' on the semtitic script continuum, how should the standard be used to encode texts that fall between the nodes? This is an issue even if one accepts the concept of nodes, i.e. of a linear continuum with clearly identifiable chronological or cultural script instances. Dean has, convincingly I think, presented examples of overlapping of use of such 'nodes' among ancient communities, making it harder to distinguish them from within the continuum.
John Hudson
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Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
