Peter Constable scripsit: > > > In that sense, treating Phoenician as a script variant of Hebrew > > > is a big win for many of the users of the script, since they > > > would have a hard time deciphering the bizarre (to them) script > > > variant but have no problem reading texts originally written in > > > it in different fonts. > > I didn't understand that statement the first time round, and still am > not sure I understand it. (The antecedent for the last occurrence of > "it" isn't clear to me, so I'm having difficulty interpreting the whole > thing, apart from the matter of whether the point makes sense.)
I interpret it to mean that if you know Hebrew, you can read text in Old Hebrew or Phoenician or whatever, provided you can get past the script barrier. For such people, there is some advantage in encoding these old texts with Hebrew characters, since a simple font change will convert between the authentic and the intelligible. By the same token, there would be some advantage to Croats wishing to read Serbian if it's encoded in an encoding that can be rendered with either Latin or Cyrillic letters (or digraphs); such a thing could easily be constructed and mapped to Unicode, thanks to the Croat-specific digraph compatibility characters present. That wouldn't make such an encoding a Good Thing in the wider world, though. -- He made the Legislature meet at one-horse John Cowan tank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that [EMAIL PROTECTED] hardly nobody could get there and most of http://www.reutershealth.com the leaders would stay home and let him go http://www.ccil.org/~cowan to work and do things as he pleased. --Mencken, Declaration of Independence
