At 06:19 -0800 2004-05-03, D. Starner wrote:
Hebrew has the same 22 characters, with the same character properties.
And a baroque set of additional marks and signs, none of which apply to any of the Phoenician letterforms, EVER, in the history of typography, reading, and literature.
And you call this a font variant with an argument no better than "there are 22 of these letters in both scripts so that makes them the same"? Grasp at that straw if you will. The structural argument is not the only one taken into account when a unification.
I hear your arguments. I understand them. They are insufficient. They ignore that Hebrew has become something else. They ignore the historical relationships between Phoenician and Hebrew, as they do between Phoenician and Greek. Wrapping up all of these as glyph variants of Hebrew is untenably short-sighted.
I cannot support a unification of Hebrew as encoded and the Phoenician scripts. It is a false unification by everything I know from my study of the writing systems of the world. The Universal Character Set would be impoverished, foolishly and pointlessly, if this false unification is accepted.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
