From: "Dean Snyder" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Patrick Andries wrote at 8:55 AM on Monday, May 3, 2004: > > >I got this answer from a forum dedicated to Ancient Hebrew : > > > >� Very few people can read let alone recognize the paleo Hebrew font. > >Most modern Hebrew readers are not even aware that Hebrew was once > >written in the paleo Hebrew script. > > The same could be said for archaic Greek versus modern Greek - do you > propose to encode archaic Greek separately?
Why not? If it helps serving better the scholars, searchers, students, and script fans so that they will more accurately represent this historic script than with the modern form. After all, when I look at some medieval French texts written with what we call "�criture gothique", with its historic orthograph and letters (with long s notably, and with the absence of modern accents, and very distinct and complex letter shapes), many French natives will have lots of difficulties to recognize it as French, thinking that this could be written in Latin. They will recognize that these letters are really beautiful, but will be often intrigated by some of them, where some letters are misidentified (b/p, o/u/v, d/a, i/n/u...), Uppercase letters are even more difficult to decipher... This is what appears with publications with careful typography. The situation is even worse with manuscript written with a plum (which very similar to the German Sutterlin). We don't need to go too far in the history to find during WW1 handwritten letters of soldiers to their family, using letter forms that were commonly taught in schools at that time (most of these letters are extrermely stable in their letter forms and carefully drawn, in a typographic view): very difficult to read by most French natives, despite it is really using the same modern popular French language and vocabulary as used and understood today...
