At 05:10 -0800 2004-05-03, D. Starner wrote:
And I've got Latin fonts, whose use will render a Bible unclean. (Might come in handy for Tantric religious works, though.) More seriously, I imagine some German religious communities were very strict on the Bible in Fraktur instead of a radical new Roman font. It still doesn't mean they're seperate scripts; it just means that they are picky on how their religious texts are presented.
I don't buy that argument, any more than I buy the argument that the historical relationships between these scripts is unimportant, or the argument that despite how complex Square Hebrew has become with it signs and diacritics and stretched letters and alef-lamed ligatures and Yiddish ligatures
If you people, after all of this discussion, can think that it is possible to print a newspaper article in Hebrew language or Yiddish in Phoenician letters, then all I can say is that understanding of the fundamentals of script identity is at an all-time low. I'm really surprised.
I don't think that any of the arguments against encoding Phoenician separately from Hebrew wash. Some people have made Hebrew font hacks with Phoenician glyphs? So what? There are Latin font hacks just the same. You can map one-to-one to Hebrew? So what? You can map one-to-one to Syriac and Greek, and probably others. You want to encode Moabite texts in Hebrew transliteration? Go right ahead.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
