My knowledge of Aramaic script is a little scanty, but my understanding is more or less the same as Peter's.
Which leads me to suggest that encoding Aramaic separately would be a bit like encoding Old Akkadian (Cuneiform) separately from NeoAssyrian (Cuneiform). Which would be a bit silly (and not what we are planning in that arena).... Note that some people are even willing to argue that the substrate languages might be considered distinct, too--in case that is the argument which would be applied to Aramaic. K ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "John Cowan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 4:12 PM Subject: Re: Colourful scripts and Aramaic > On 07/08/2003 13:00, John Cowan wrote: > > >Peter Kirk scripsit: > > > > > > > >>Is it a principle of Unicode that a new script should not be encoded > >>because it is one to one correspondence with an existing one, even > >>though there is no graphical relationship? Well, that is certainly in > >>conflict with Michael's comments about Aramaic, Samaritan etc. > >> > >> > > > >No. But it's a principle (an informal one) not to use resources encoding > >symbol repertoires that are just monalphabetic encryptions of existing > >language-specific repertoires. Which seems to me (I am willing to be > >corrected on this) to be what we have here. > > > > > > > Well, it seems to me that in the case of the Aramaic proposal we don't > even have that. We have an archaic version of the script which is now > used mainly for Hebrew, and which many scholars still call Aramaic (in > distinction from paleo-Hebrew) although Unicode calls it Hebrew. The > Aramaic glyphs are almost all recognisably the same as or slight > variants on the Hebrew ones. And Hebrew script is already used, > uncontroversially, for large corpora of Aramaic e.g. in the Talmud. Why > a new script for the few surviving examples of ancient Aramaic in this > script? > > -- > Peter Kirk > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) > http://www.qaya.org/ > > > >
