At 10:25 -0700 2004-05-03, Peter Kirk wrote:
It is not possible to take an encoded Genesis text which is pointed and cantillated, and blithly change the font to Moabite or Punic and expect anyone to even recognize it as Hebrew.
Michael, you assert this, but do you actually know it to be true?
Yes. Yes, I do. Mark Shoulson did a test today with a group of well-educated young Hebrew-speaking computer programmers. They did not recognize it.
After all, this is not your area of expertise.
Script recognition and identification is within my portfolio, I should like to think.
I agree that this kind of mixture is an anachronistic one, much like the example I mentioned earlier of Vietnamese in Fraktur.
Far less anachronistic, and I wouldn't take a bet that there weren't Fraktur (or Blackletter at least) fonts for Vietnamese already.
But this text would be easily recognisable and readable by anyone familiar with both Hebrew and the Phoenician glyphs.
I do not believe that any Yiddish speaker would accept a text in a "Phoenician" font as Yiddish.
The field of application of Phoenician is so limited that the script just can't be mapped on to the rich typographic and font traditon of Square Hebrew with any sense at all.
Wedding invitations are routinely set in Blackletter and Gaelic typefaces. I bet you �20 that if an ordinary Hebrew speaker sent out a wedding invitation in Palaeo-Hebrew no one would turn up on the day.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
