Your quotation in no way supports your conclusion. I cannot see in how it could be relevant to Unicode. I have reason to believe that the tana'im were not familiar with the Unicode character model.
Jony > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark E. Shoulson > Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 2:51 PM > To: Peter Constable > Cc: Unicode List > Subject: Re: [hebrew] Re: Response to a Proposal to Encode > Phoenician in Unicode > > > Peter Constable wrote: > > >[choosing not to cross-post to all three lists] > > > > > > > >>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > >> > >> > >Behalf > > > > > >>Of Mark E. Shoulson > >> > >> > >>The Tanaaim pretty clearly did not view this as a matter of > >> > >> > >font-variants. > > > >In fairness, Unicode does not encode legal judgments any > more than it > >does the phonology of any given language. To say that the Tanaaim > >considers two groups of letterforms to be distinct seems to me to be > >comparable to saying that speakers of English distinguish > phonemes /k/ > >and /s/, and just as we don't use that as an argument to > encode both a > >"hard" c and a "soft" c, I don't think we can use a legal > distinction > >as an argument for or against distinct encoding. > > > > > Well, this is a decision distinguishing writing forms, not > spoken forms, > and after all, writing is what we're talking about. > > >On the other hand, to the extent that the legal judgment can > be seen as > >a reflection of perceptions of script identity by an entire society, > >that may be relevant. > > > > > Yes. Obviously, I'm not demanding that Unicode support the Tanaitic > decision for "legal" reasons or anything, just pointing it out as an > indication that they did not consider Paleo-Hebrew to be the > same script > as Square Hebrew. And that, I think, would also be my answer to Dean > Snyder's response. They distinguished between the two scripts to the > extent that something written in one was different than the > same thing > written in the other. Note also that the very same paragraph > discusses > cases of scrolls written in Aramaic instead of Hebrew (or > Hebrew instead > of Aramaic, for the Aramaic parts of the Bible). The implication is > that they considered the scripts to be different scripts. > > ~mark > > > >
