On 27/05/2004 17:44, Peter Constable wrote:
Well, I accept that this is a possible scenario. If it is the kind of thing the proposer had in mind, why didn't he say so a month ago?...
I find [PC's Sally/Latisha usage scenario] a bit unreasonable for
several reasons.
It may well not be reasonable, or reasonable but not a scenario we decide to give much weight to. I just threw it out as one of many possible scenarios, and specifically picking something are representative of a kind of scenario the original proposer might have had in mind that is unrelated to paleography.
To me the answer to this argument is simple: plain text is intended to communicate semantic content only, not visual form. If Sally is sending material to Latisha as plain text, with no markup, she should not have any expectations about what the result will look like - only that its semantics will be preserved, which they will be as her Phoenician words are still meaningful with square Hebrew glyphs (that is how many scholars represent Phoenician text). If she wants to control its appearance, she should use graphics or PDF format, or at least HTML which will specify the font used on her computer (and which is the default e-mail format in many products including those of your company, Peter). As a 16-year-old maybe she doesn't know this, but she should be taught it in her ICT or whatever it is called classes.
Well, this is based on the assumption that Sally and Latisha's mother script (if we can say that on the analogy of mother tongue) is Latin. If they are Israelis, their mother script is Hebrew and they can easily distinguish it from Phoenician, but they can't easily distinguish Fraktur from Antiqua. If they are Chinese, probably they cannot easily distinguish either pair, although perhaps they can distinguish Chao and Chang.
* A comparable discussion could appear involving Fraktur and Latincharacters
and Chao and Chang.
I agree, but only somewhat. I think those situations are probably not as representative of the casual-, non-specialist-user scenario, and that in that case Sally and Latisha are probably more likely to be paying close attention to the fonts being used. Even for the non-specialist situation, in a Fraktur/Antigua case (the Chao vs Chang is definitely out at least for *non-Asian* non-specialists), Sally is telling Latisha, "Make sure it shows up with those dark, old-English-looking characters", and if it's Times or Helvetica Latisha will probably know it's wrong. In the Phoenician case, if anything Sally's probably saying, "This will show up looking like pretty unfamiliar letters -- like maybe a sideways A or something" and Latisha might well see square Hebrew and think it fits the description.
...And it would have worked with HTML e-mail, as long as Latisha had the same fonts installed as Sally. This does not take more work to prepare. It would also have worked with an attached Word etc document. The scenario you are looking at is actually a rather unlikely one. We assume that Sally has composed her document in some application that supports some kind of rich text which specifies fonts, because otherwise she would not see Phoenician on her own screen. But for some reason she chooses not to send to Latisha the rich text which she has prepared, but to convert this to plain text before sending it - something which usually requires a deliberate extra step, either cutting and pasting into a plain text application (in which Sally would herself see Hebrew glyphs rather than Phoenician), deliberately choosing a non-default plain text file format, or clicking "Yes" on some box asking if she wants to throw away formatting information. So Sally has corrupted her own text by discarding formatting information. Unicode cannot protect her from her own mistakes!
* Phoenician is an illustration more than text in this instance; ifthey
used a picture here, everything would have worked.
True, but it takes more work to prepare a graphic than text, and it's not at all unreasonable to expect Sally would do the latter if she could have a reasonable expectation that it might work. If her software is likely the same as Latisha's and it comes with a Phoenician font, she can reasonably expect it to work. Of course, if the characters are unified, the software probably *didn't* come with a font... So, I guess this one comes out as indecisive.
I am of course assuming that Sally's computer has at least one Unicode Hebrew font, but that is certain if she is using a recent version of Windows. It is I suppose possible that she could set it up so that a Phoenician font is the default display for RTL text. Well, I could set up my computer so that Latin text appears in a Klingon font. But if I do something strange and non-standard like that I should hardly expect others to see the Klingon font in plain text e-mail I send to them.
On 28/05/2004 02:56, Christopher Fynn wrote:
...
Scholars often need to seperate text by the particular
script the text was written in, often down to the
very scribe. That's done by storing it some sort
of tagged format, and having your search system
let you select based on the script--trivial in most
database systems. Phoencian and Hebrew are just a bit
broader than most distinctions.
If this is "trivial" for scholarly users then using a tailoring to achieve interleaved collation and / or folding wouldn't be difficult for them either.
I disagree. Tailoring is possible, but it is far more complicated than adding a script or scribe name tag to a database. Anyway, D. Starner's requirement for detailed script marking will not be met by defining a separate Phoenician script. I think we can assume that Unicode will not want to encode individual scribes' handwriting as separate scripts. :-)
On 27/05/2004 20:10, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
... See http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/t08/t0805.htm for some Talmudic discussion of the matter.It is interesting to see there that Daniel 5:8 (compare v.25 - the event can be dated to October 539 BC) is cited as an example of the mutual illegibility of palaeo-Hebrew and square Hebrew characters. It is suggested there that the original writing on the wall, at Belshazzar's feast, was in square characters which only Daniel could read. In fact the scenario was more likely the other way round: the inscription was in palaeo-Hebrew. Daniel, born in the land of Israel, could probably read these glyphs, but maybe the Babylonian wise men could not. The language of the inscription is not Hebrew but Aramaic, but maybe the letters were palaeo-Hebrew. But then the author of the book of Daniel ascribes Daniel's ability to read the writing not to the different script but to wisdom given by God.
On 27/05/2004 22:12, Doug Ewell wrote:
...
I'm sure it's not true for all newspapers in all Latin-script cultures,
but in most of the newspapers I see, the trend over the last 50 years
has definitely been *away* from all-caps headlines. Most headlines tend
to be in Title Caps or Sentence caps. (The front page of the New York
Times, with its double- or triple-decked top-story headline in a
relatively small point size, is often an exception.)
Well, typical British newspapers now seem to use all capitals for the main front page headline and some other major headlines, and sentence caps (not title caps which are an immediate give-away of American origin) for other headlines. But the majority of advertisements use all capitals.
As several people have pointed out, I was wrong to say that all capitals headlines are easier to read than a mixed case one. They are used to attract attention rather than for readability. Nevertheless, they are readable, and because of this they are in regular use, both for headlines and for advertisements - which would quickly drop something which could not be read! And that is enough to confirm my argument.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
