Elaine Keown
still in Texas
Hi,
The core issue in all this is how to apply the Unicode
character/glyph model to an old 22-letter alphabet
with (most likely) a 3,700 year history.
Personalities and sniping aside, that is the central
issue.
And I suspect that this 22-letter alphabet should be
greatly unified, but maybe not 100%.
In addition, since we are actually talking about
computers, about optimal software, I would have hoped
that the real model used for script dis-unification
and unification would be technical, not historical.
I would have thought that's obvious----no version of a
script's history should be the primary evidence for
making a technical decision.
And, with Semitics, versions of script history change
through time and the perception of the scholar. We
keep digging up new evidence, and everything shifts
when we do that....
--- Peter Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If software companies are ever to provide support
for > Phoenician etc, it needs to work with the
encoding
> which scholars and others actually use
This is a practical point, but I think the other
problem is that software companies may assume that the
Unicode Technical Committee, because of its prestige,
actually contains Semitists in its membership and is
(as it frequently professes) in steady contact with
the user communities.
Neither of those are true. The UTC has no Semitists,
and has steadily ignored them---today is certainly the
same story.
I will repeat, this time with more exact references,
what I wrote a while back:
In the late 1980s, Alan Groves of Westminster
Theological Seminary, argued with early Unicoders
about how to represent Hebrew. At that point Prof.
Groves was one of the world's most prominent
computational Hebraists--he has since gone on to do
hermeneutics....
The early Unicoders ignored him and insulted him.
And the diacritics that Unicode screwed up, in the
canonical classes, are those he knew about.
Are you planning to ignore us again and make another
serious mistake?
Maybe this time someone will be watching you, you
won't make your errors in darkness--Elaine Keown
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/
