Re: [hebrew] Re: Ancient Northwest Semitic Script (was Re: why Aramaicnow)
On 28/12/2003 20:47, D. Starner wrote: ... Intra-script, a difference in appearance has call for seperate codings. Inter-script, if the appearance is dissimilar enough to be a bar to reading, and there's a disjoint population of users (so that one is not a handwriting or cipher variant of another), there is reason to encode a seperate script. Well, there is not a disjoint population of serious users of Phoenician and Hebrew today, in that anyone who wants to read Phoenician inscriptions is almost certainly already familiar with Hebrew (a very closely related language) in Hebrew script. The only other user community that I know of for Phoenician is those who are interested in the development of alphabets and glyph shapes. But only images, or just possibly a wide range of fonts, can provide the script style distinctions which such people require. Emerson's division would suggest four different scripts ought to be used for coding the same texts with the same logical characters with the same names, Yes. Look at Serbo-Croat; there are the same texts with the same logical characters, one in Latin and one in Cyrillic. I'd be surprised to find that the only case; I would assume some of the Turkic languages that switched from Cyrillic to Latin did so by changing glyphs instead of any deeper script features. Yes, this is true at least of Azerbaijani, which mapped Cyrillic glyphs to Latin ones one-to-one. But with Serbo-Croat we are talking of two separate communities which prefer to use separate scripts for what is essentially the same language; and with Azerbaijani we are talking of a deliberate decision by a people, or at least its government, to change scripts. -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
Re: [hebrew] Re: Ancient Northwest Semitic Script (was Re: why Aramaicnow)
At 06:55 -0800 2003-12-29, Peter Kirk wrote: Yes, this is true at least of Azerbaijani, which mapped Cyrillic glyphs to Latin ones one-to-one. But with Serbo-Croat we are talking of two separate communities which prefer to use separate scripts for what is essentially the same language; and with Azerbaijani we are talking of a deliberate decision by a people, or at least its government, to change scripts. In Sanhedrin and Mishnaic text deliberate distinction is made between Samaritan and Square Hebrew, as will be demonstrated in the Samaritan proposal. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: [hebrew] Re: Ancient Northwest Semitic Script (was Re: why Aramaicnow)
As to harm, where's the harm in encoding Japanese kanzi separately, or Latin uncial, or a complete set of small capitals as a third case? Where's the harm in encoding Latin Renaissance scripts separately? Spell checking, for one. Should you use T-cedilla or T-comma for Romanian? What if your keyboard emits one and your spellchecker accepts the other? (I guess T-comma is the correct answer, but there's a lot of Latin-2 data and old keyboards running around that use T-cedilla.) An Irish spellchecker should work whether you use unical or antigua fonts. Japanese kanzi is a slightly different matter, but the seperate encoding of over ten thousand characters is a problem in itself. But should a difference in appearance count in a decision to code separately within Unicode when *every* other feature of two scripts is identical, including origin? Intra-script, a difference in appearance has call for seperate codings. Inter-script, if the appearance is dissimilar enough to be a bar to reading, and there's a disjoint population of users (so that one is not a handwriting or cipher variant of another), there is reason to encode a seperate script. Emerson's division would suggest four different scripts ought to be used for coding the same texts with the same logical characters with the same names, Yes. Look at Serbo-Croat; there are the same texts with the same logical characters, one in Latin and one in Cyrillic. I'd be surprised to find that the only case; I would assume some of the Turkic languages that switched from Cyrillic to Latin did so by changing glyphs instead of any deeper script features. Indeed, by the same argument, we could encode a lot of scripts together. ISCII did it for Indic scripts. I'm sure we could do some serious merging among syllabic scripts - 12A8(#4776;) is the same as 13A7(#5031;) and 1472(#5234;) with different glyphs - and among alphabetic scripts, and even in alphabetic scripts - I mean, 015D(#349;) is basically the same as 015F(#351;) and 0283(#643;), aren't they? (One just-for-fun idea that's been bouncing around in my head is a universal character set that encodes something closer to the underlying phonemic characters and applies orthography selectors. English, unfortunately, moves from a language that can be supported on the most ancient bitty-box to a language that takes serious work to get right under this system.) There may also be some thinking of HTML/XML/XHTML web display of characters where forcing of font is not reliable. One would not want a discussion of ancient Phoenician characters to display modern Hebrew forms! But this same problem currently applies to runes, medieval Latin characters, Han characters and so forth. One shouldn't let the current shortcomings of one display method among many dictate Unicode encodings. One display method? Of the common document types: PDF and Postscript embed fonts and don't have this problem, but aren't editable. A Word document doesn't embed fonts (usually?), and neither do OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, XML, and most other word-processing formats or data exchange formats. So font choice is not reliable in these formats. A plain text document can't embed fonts or even programmatically suggest a font. As for Phoenician, perhaps a scholar may be happy with it as a font variant of Hebrew, but I don't see why it's not equally a font variant of Greek. No non-scholarly user (and Phoenician may well have a few) will understand why Phoenician is considered Hebrew, because they don't look alike. -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
Re: [hebrew] Re: Ancient Northwest Semitic Script (was Re: why Aramaicnow)
-Message d'origine - De: "D. Starner" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Indeed, by the same argument, we could encode a lot of scripts together. ISCII did it for Indic scripts. I'm sure we could do some serious merging among syllabic scripts - 12A8(#4776;) is the same as 13A7(#5031;) I understand this is said tongue in cheek, but even then This merging seems reasonable to you because you consider theirsimilarEnglish names, butnottheirdifferent phonetic value ([k]vs [ka]) or their ISO 10646Frenchnames for instance (respectively K for Ethiopic and KA Cherokee). KA being 12AB in the French version. See Daniels-Bright (Table 51.5 which gives k (ka) for U+12A8 [k] and ka for U+12AB [ka] or [k]) and Amharique pour francophones (L'Harmattan) (p. 5 which gives ke/k for U+12A8 and ka for U+12AB). The English names are, of course, perfectly okay (don't want to open a can of worms here;-)). P. A. - o - O - o - ISO 10646 en franais http://pages.infinit.net/hapax
