Peter Kirk asked: > So is there a real justification for separate alphabets here?
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2311.pdf And Michael Everson can, no doubt, provide further justification beyond this sketch of how the roadmap has been structured for this script family. Note that when dealing with historic scripts it is not possible to have a completely axiomatic approach to determining what should or should not be designated as distinct scripts for encoding. To a certain extant it is an artform to discover what are the significant periods and ranges of forms to "draw a box around" to result in a sufficient set of encodings to match the scholastic need for representation of textual data, without erring either to the "lumping" side (just encode Aramaic once) or on the "splitting" side (encode each distinct local alphabet in each distinct, identifiable time period). Note also that decisions about what further Phoenician-derived scripts to encode is also influenced by the fact that for obvious modern reasons, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac are already encoded as distinct scripts. --Ken
