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/
