Re: why Aramaic now

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 12/25/03 16:46, Elaine Keown wrote:

     Elaine Keown

Dear Mark and List:

 

Some of the sets of symbols I found--- snip
--are innately controversial because of the 
     

Roadmap.  
   

Examples of innately controversial for Mark:
I think Hebrew's been written since 1,150 B.C.  But at
every stage it had different punctuation, at some
stages there were various numbers, etc.
So I divided "Extended Hebrew"--which I now think has
about 300 items--into meaningful subsets.  The
"epigraphy subset"--about 30 items, including the
symbols for "zuz" and "shekel" which I emailed you
once--is delegated by the Roadmap to a potential other
script.  

OK... so the controversy would be that you will say they are Hebrew 
symbols and the Roadmap says they're Samaritan or Mandaic or whatever, 
is that it?  That's no big deal, as far as I can tell.  These are 
punctuation symbols, effectively.  So what if a "Hebrew" text winds up 
using punctuation from the "Samaritan" block (or vice-versa)?  Such 
usage probably ought to be noted in the informative notes on the 
characters, naturally.  Cyrillic and Greek (and Hebrew) already use 
plenty of symbols from the "Latin" block, and nobody minds.  Similarly, 
in some of the orthographies you mention (about which I know little) 
which use Arabic diacritics, etc, on Hebrew letters, I see nothing wrong 
with using the code-points from the Arabic blocks to encode them.  
That's what they are, after all: it's still a shadda, even if it's on 
top of a Hebrew qof (or whatever; I'm making this up). 

Similarly, the "Samaritan subset"--about 20 items--is
supposedly to become part of a different subsets
according to the Roadmap.  

So?  Maybe your breakdown makes more sense, and they should be kept in a 
single "Samaritan" subset.  Maybe the UTC will agree with you.  And if 
they don't, what's the difference?  The symbols are still encoded, still 
*the* character (not just glyph) you want, still available for use with 
Samaritan texts.  They may not have "Samaritan" in their Unicode 
character-name, but that means nothing.

I'm not saying you're wrong; you may be 100% correct.  But even if you 
are, I still don't see much of a problem here.

~mark