Michael, I think you are missing the point that other people do have time and resources to devote to 'further research' at this time, and this is why these discussions are happening. Personally, I'm happy to accept that the position of Aramaic in the roadmap is an open issue and is going to remain so, but as Elaine pointed out there is a lot of interest in Unicode among Biblical scholars right now -- which is a Good Thing -- and some of these people are wanting to start addressing some of the questions and issues that they are confronting as they proceed.
The main answer to their question is that they can use Hebrew to transliterate whatever they want. Whether Phoenician or Samaritan needs to be encoded for OTHER purposes than those of these particular scholars (who are happy using Hebrew square letter fonts for them) is another question.
I don't think this means you personally need to do anything -- or Rick or Ken -- but there are going to be some proposals developed for additional Hebrew characters
I'm not complaining about that, and am helping with two of them.
and some documents on different approaches to unifying or not unifying the bewildering array of early semitic writing systems,
That *is* something that is going to impact on what I have to do, and I would really rather not be forced to give up doing other things to deal with that. Which I am, even now.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
