Peter,
Peter Kirk wrote:
<snip>On 05/06/2004 08:25, John Hudson wrote:
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.
So let's drop "script" for now. My basic contention is that each letter of the Phoenician abjad is not a separate abstract character, but that it and the corresponding square Hebrew letter are glyph variants of the same abstract characters. And this is clearly the understanding of Semitic scholars, as summarised by Patrick Durusau and quoted above. On the other hand, nearly everyone agrees that there should be a mechanism for distinguishing them in plain text.
The reason I pointed out that Semitic scholars had reached their view long prior to Unicode was to point out that they were not following the character/glyph model of the Unicode standard.
In other words, if you ask a Semitic scholar a question about representation of Phoenician, you are most likely getting an answer based on a criteria other than the character/glyph model of the Unicode standard.
That in no way makes the Semitic scholar's answer wrong, in fact is it right, for their domain. It has no relevance at all for a proposal to encode a script based on the Unicode character/glyph model.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
-- Patrick Durusau Director of Research and Development Society of Biblical Literature [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
