The needs of the Semitic community must be taken into account, but so must the needs of others. It is preposterous to say that the needs of these scholars to have a single encoding outweighs the needs of others to have separate ones, since the scholars in question demonstrably do NOT need a single encoding: they've been managing okay without one for quite some time. Would it be nice if they didn't have to manage in that way? Perhaps, but not so nice as to deny other people their *legitimate* needs (how do I know it isn't that nice? Just because things have been working okay so far without a unique encoding, and there will not be a unique encoding in use by Semitic scholars for a *long* time, whether or not Phoenician is ever encoded).
Please stop pretending that the scholarly world outside the Semiticist community is inconsequential in this regard, and that the needs of the Semiticist community are being ignored. They are also being considered, as they must be.
~mark
Peter Kirk wrote:
I note that the revised version of Michael Everson's Phoenician proposal (dated 29 May) has now been posted in place of the original at http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2746.pdf and http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2746. This has corrected the error in the answer to question C2a. It now lists at C2b five users of the script with whom Michael has had contact, although only one of these (Jo Ann Hackett) is a scholar of Semitic languages. There is no mention now of proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite.
The link from http://evertype.com/formal.html remains broken.
