Michael Everson wrote:
No Georgian can read Nuskhuri without a key. I maintain that no Hebrew reader can read Phoenician without a key. I maintain that it is completely unacceptable to represent Yiddish text in a Phoenician font and have anyone recognize it at all.
But no one is going to do that. No one is talking about doing that. This is a complete irrelevancy.
No, it is not. If Phoenician letterforms are just a font variant of Square Hebrew then it is reasonable to assume that readers of Square Hebrew will accept them in various contexts. Such as newspaper articles, or advertising copy, or restaurant menus, or wedding invitations. THAT is font switching.
I consider this fundamental to script identification. The accident of 1:1 correspondence to another alphabet is not, in my view, sufficient justification for unifying them.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
