> From: John Hudson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 11:59 AM
> 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... > 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. To make discussion easier, let me speak in terms of an analogy, referring to the nodes as integers and the points in between as real numbers. If someone could show documents written within a single community in a reasonably concurrent time frame (i.e. they're communicating with one another) that mixed several rational values from the entire range between 0 and 1, then I'd say the nodes 0 and 1 were nothing more than an artifact of our classification. But if one can only point to cases of (say) documents from a given community containing 0 and .6, or 0 and .9, then it would seem that the nodes had some conceptual validity within that community. IIRC, we have been given indication of the latter, but I'm not sure we've been given indication of the former. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
