Peter Kirk wrote:
All Hudson is pointing out is that long PRIOR to Unicode, Semitic scholars reached the conclusion all Semitic languages share the same 22 characters. A long standing and quite useful conclusion that has nothing at all to do with your proposal.
But I dispute his last sentence. If the writing systems of these languages share the same abstract characters, they form a single script, which conflicts with the proposal to encode Phoenician as a separate script.
Did you read, also, my messages regarding the perception of instances of a script continuum? Restating your perception that the instances of Phoenician and Hebrew represent the same 'script' for Unicode purposes is just reverting to the fundamental disagreement with those who have stated a desire or need to distinguish such instances in plain text. 'Script' in Unicode is a generic term that does not necessarily relate to notions of script outside Unicode. The determining feature of a Unicode script, i.e. a labelled subset of characters, is that it is something that can be differentiated from other subsets of characters *in plain text*. Whether things so-differentiated are considered individual scripts outside of Unicode isn't very relevant to this usage. Indeed, Unicode might have avoided all this debate by not using the term script at all.
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
