...Thank you, Jim, for this interesting reference, which I am copying to the Hebrew list.
For an example of what might be needed, see Rochelle I. S. Altman's discussion "Some Aspects of Older Writing Systems: With Focus on the DSS" at http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/orion/programs/Altman/Altman99.shtml :
Altman indicates how differences in ligaturing, height, spacing and glyph variation are used in the unpointed "Phoenician/Hebraic Writing Systems" to indicate emphasis, pause, stress and even the difference between shin and sin.
Encoding these texts with reasonable fullness would require a "stressed variant" variation selector, vowel phone variation selectors, a sin/shin variation selector as well as ZWJ and variant spaces already encoded.
Jim Allan
I note that the author refers inconsistently, even within the same paragraph, to "the Phoenician/Hebraic writing systems" and "the Phoenician/Hebraic writing system". When he uses more careful terminology, he writes: "one symbol-set system, <http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/orion/programs/Altman/Altman99.shtml#ftnt2> but two different script systems: Paleo-Hebraic and Square Aramaic" (i.e. in Unicode terms, Phoenician and Hebrew). See also footnote 33 which explains the terminology further and makes analogies with Latin and Greek.
But I think that this document should also be taken with a big pinch of salt. The author assert that "In trilinear limit systems, the symbols move up and down according to the stress rhythms of the languages. // Durational notation, that is, the length of time a sound should be held, is recorded by the amount of movement from side-to-side, that is, expansions and contractions of the space between graphic forms." But this is simply untrue as a generalisation across many script systems, even if it is true of some examples of some scripts. There is of course an obvious tendency for some writers of any language to write important words, those stressed when spoken, with larger or more carefully shaped and spaced glyphs, and to write secondary material, whichis likely to be spoken hurriedly, with small and indistinct glyphs. But this kind of variation is surely beyond the scope of Unicode.
It is very interesting to me that there does seem to have been a glyph distinction (though a very subtle one) between sin and shin, in the "serech" example (http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/orion/programs/Altman/serech.jpg) of what is undoubtedly (in Unicode terms) Hebrew script. If this distinction can be verified a case can be made for encoding a separate HEBREW LETTER SIN, equivalent to shin with sin dot. But it is difficult to verify this when three scribes within the same document make the distinction in three different ways.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
