It appears to me that script experts may resemble experts in dialects/languages: there are lumpers and splitters........
I'm a lumper, but I am a thinking lumper....I will be thinking about Phoenician retrieval in early 2004....
There is zero chance that Phoenician will be considered to be a glyph variant of Hebrew. Zero chance. The number of books about writing systems, from children's books to books for adults, which contain references to the Phoenician alphabet as the parent to both Etruscan and Hebrew, are legion.
Some scholars may decide to transliterate all Phoenician texts into Hebrew script and read only that, and retrieve it from their databases, and that is perfectly fine. Lots of people transliterate Sanskrit into Latin and never use Devanagari.
I would be happy to inform Debbie. The font for the Samaritan marks is still in rough draft due to what I did in fall....
What "marks" are these?
and I had confusing email from a Samaritan expert I consulted that needs to be processed.....(re vowels not unification)
Documents available to me suggest that Samaritan can (but needn't) use Arabic fatha and kasra and others, and that there are orthographies for which some letters are used vocalically, a bit like Yiddish.
> is clearly a different script from Hebrew.
Different is in the eye of the beholder, I'm afraid. Or, if you will, in the eye of the cyber-machine....
No. It is a question of history and development. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
