Intra-script, a difference in appearance has call for seperate codings. Inter-script, if the appearance is dissimilar enough to be a bar to reading, and there's a disjoint population of users (so that one is not a handwriting or cipher variant of another), there is reason to encode a seperate script.
I agree that dissimilar appearance enough to be a bar to reading is one reason to encode a script or set of scripts separately.
But is that *alone* a reason to encode separately if there no other reasons to encode separately and there are countervailing reasons to unify?
The Unicode encoding of Runic unifies separate scripts for separate languages using separate alphabets. The difference between staveless runes and the early Germanic futhark is as great or greater than any difference between Aramaic scripts and Phoenician.
All the ancient scripts are mostly handwriting variants of one another, if you also consider scratching into potsherds as a form of handwriting. There are also variants developed for carving into stone but of course carving in stone was not the norm.
The northwest Semitic abjad is *normally* used to cover the same small groups of languages which are closely related and share many words, especially as spelled without vowel pointing.
The argument here should be, I think, whether in this case the unity of the northwest Semitic abjad/alphabet and the common origin of the characters and the usefulness of searching different texts overrides the dissimilarity of appearance that developed.
A Word document doesn't embed fonts (usually?), ...
But when used in publishing on the web usually the fonts are embedded if font style is important. Similarly if e-mailing or other transferring to another party.
As for Phoenician, perhaps a scholar may be happy with it as a font variant
of Hebrew, but I don't see why it's not equally a font variant of Greek.
A reasonable question.
Greek is a variant of Phoenician in origin.
Why would it not be useful to code it and Phoenician the same?
First there is the matter of directionality for all but the earliest inscriptions, left-to-right instead or right-to-left. Then there is the addition of further characters in Greek and the change of sound value for many of the characters. The alphabet is no longer the same in its size or in its values. The phonetic structure of Greek was very different from the phonetic structure of the northwestern Semitic languages.
A Phoenician name will be spelled very differently by a Greek. Searches won't find it. The same letters probably won't be used. Similarly a Greek name would not be written the same by a Phoenician.
Difference of language means there isn't much use in doing cross-searches between material written in Phoenician and material written in Greek. The same is not true about cross-searching material written in any northwest Semitic language. The languages are very close. Names will usually appear identically. It is impossible to say, for example, whether the Gezer calendar is written in Phoenician language or the Hebrew language or some other closely related language.
The Hebrew Torah exists in slightly variant versions, but all use this same 22-letter northwest Semitic abjad. Other than some scribal and editorial variations and a few spelling variations that have nothing to do with the script used, the texts are as identical as most texts that one finds in disparate copies in the ancient world or medieval world.
Does it make sense that Unicode introduce *four* separate encodings to represent variants of essentially the same text written with the same characters just because the glyphs differ in appearance.
Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs, and here the characters are the same except in their glyphic appearance.
No
non-scholarly user (and Phoenician may well have a few) will understand why
Phoenician is considered Hebrew, because they don't look alike.
Phoenician should *not* be considered Hebrew. They are different languages, though very closely related.
Phoenician scripts (and there are more than one) should *not* be considered the same as the modern square Hebrew script or modern cursive Hebrew script or the Rashi Hebrew script or the modern Samaritan or medieval Samaritan or papyrus Aramaic or Palmyrene Aramaic any more than Blackletter Latin script is the same as Uncial Latin script or Italic Latin script or any more than Chinese characters are considered the same as Japanese characters or Korean characters.
Because one often wishes, rightly, to distinguish such differences, does not mean encoding those differences within Unicode is the most useful course to take.
If a non-scholarly user wants to display something in a particular Phoenician style (and there is more than one of these) then that user must select the Phoenician font the user wishes (if the user has more than one). That is true whether Phoenician scripts and Hebrew scripts are unified in Unicode or not unified in Unicode.
A non-scholarly user of runes may also not understand why Swedish staveless runes are considered the same as the Germanic futhark runes when they don't look alike. Some modern Japanese still don't understand how Japanese kanzi can be unified with Chinese characters when they don't look alike.
But if northwestern Semitic unification is wholly or partly accepted by the Unicode consortium, a simple chart showing variations in form would make it clear to a non-scholarly user how the Phoenician script did evolve though intermediate steps to the modern square Aramaic letters that most consider standard modern Hebrew letters.
Jim Allan
