Peter Kirk wrote at 9:31 AM on Tuesday, May 4, 2004: >>If Phoenician is considered a glyphic variation of modern Hebrew, then >>it can also be considered a glyphic variation of modern Greek. Would >>it then follow that modern Greek should have been unified with modern >>Hebrew? (Directionality aside.) > >In principle, the only thing which makes these unifications impossible >is directionality. I am sure there are a number of other things which >would make them undesirable.
Here are the top 7 reasons why Greek is separately encoded: 8 The Greek and Phoenician character inventories are different. 7 The archaic Greek scripts dropped characters, re-deployed characters, and developed new characters completely independent of Phoenician script development (which was, in comparison, practically non-existent). 6 Greek employed right-to-left and boustrophedon writing, but then exclusively left-to-right; Phoenician has always been (to our knowledge) exclusively right-to-left. 5 Greek and Phoenician are not even in the same language phylum; Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Moabite, etc. are very closely related linguistically. 4 Greek is the language and script of a modern state; the last Phoenician script exemplar is from the 1st century BC. 3 Greek has miniscules. 2 Greeks are better sailors. and, finally, three words - 1 Alexander the Great. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
