John Cowan wrote, > Is strong RTLness really required for PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR? If not, > it can be unified with MIDDLE DOT.
Doesn't PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR have a unique meaning and function which give it a separate semantic from MIDDLE DOT? Further, don't some PH texts use the word separator while others don't use it? In preserving positional final letterform variants for round-trip transliteration, might it be desirable to insert PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR into a PH version which otherwise wouldn't separate words? If so, wouldn't it be a valid approach for a font to have an empty glyph mapped to PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR for the display of this? If so, then a unification of PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR with MIDDLE DOT would mean that the display of a plain text document so contructed would be unable to handle the display of MIDDLE DOT for its normal uses. The glyphic appearance and positioning of PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR, for what it's worth, seems to have a much wider variance than MIDDLE DOT, too. Best regards, James Kass
