Christopher Fynn wrote:
I find it interesting to compare the furore over the Phoenician proposal with the total calm over the KharoááhÄ proposal [N2732] - an archaic script in which some Sanskrit and Sanskritized GÄndhÄrÄ texts occur.
Couldn't the same arguments the Semiticists who would unify Phoenician with Hebrew are making be just as easily made by Sanskritists to say that
KharoááhÄ should be unified with Devanagri? After all ancient Sanskrit texts in whatever script are traditionally written and published in Devanagri or Latin transliteration by scholars that deal with them, just as it is claimed that Phoenician texts are written and published in modern Hebrew characters or transliteration by scholars.
I don't think this is a helpful comparison, Chris. The point has been made several times is that the Phoenician/Palaeo-Hebrew/Hebrew issue not about transliteration but about how semiticists -- for a long time -- have viewed the ancient semitic writing system, i.e. as a script continuum, not as separate scripts. It is clear from the discussions that some semticists consider this to be more fundamentally important than others, and think this view should be reflected in the encoding, while others may share the view but not agree that it necessarily be reflected in the encoding, and still others might share the view but have a desire or need to distinguish parts of the continuum in plain text. Comparisons to other writing systems -- whether they be fraktur or KharoááhÄ -- are not helpful because they do not necessarily share a comparable 'view' of the identity of the writing systems. I have been thinking today that part of the reason for the debate is that Unicode has a singular concept of 'script', a bucket into which variously shaped concepts of writing systems must be put or rejected. I don't think there is anything conceptually wrong with the idea that specific instances of a single script might be separately encoded if there is a need or desire to distinguish them in plain text. It just happens that Unicode has only one word that can be applied to such instances, and that is 'script'. It seems clear to me now that what Unicode calls a script needn't necessarily be what semiticists, or anyone else, calls a script. A functional Unicode definition of script might be formed as: a finite collection of characters that can be distinguished in plain text from other collections of characters.
There are very real issues of software implementation, font development, collation, text indexing and searching, etc. that arise from encoding multiple instances of what some users consider a single script, whether users in general opt to make the distinction in plain text or not, by using the separate character collections or unifying text in a single character collection and making the distinction at a higher level. I'm beginning to think that our time would be better spent thinking about those issues.
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
