Having duly read through this entire discussion about Michael Everson's Phoenician encoding proposal and having tried to understand all the points made in the arguments here, I was particularly struck by one point that Michael made:
> This Phoenician proposal is not a new proposal. Phoenician proposals > have been on the table for more than a decade. I went back to the earliest encoding proposal, which Rick McGowan published in UTR #3, in **1992**. Guess what? It had exactly the same 22 Phoenician letters, with almost exactly the same names. Michael reordered the alphabet to a more acceptable order, made prettier glyphs, added the four attested Phoenician numerals, and a word separator. That's it. Nothing, to my mind, illustrates the utter aridity of the discussion that has been going on today than the fact that the essential core of the encoding proposal for Phoenician has lain dormant for 12 years with *NO* controversy about the identity of the characters. And not a *SINGLE* comment has been made, through the 17 yards of discussion on the list today, about any technical detail of Michael's encoding proposal -- not even about the one and only possibly controversial aspect I can see in it, the proposal to encode a PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR character. Yesterday I posed the question: > A. Does Phoenician constitute a "landmark" in the Canaanite > script continuum? Yes/No to which I got the mincingly coy, but perhaps predictable answer, "Maybe". Upon reading all the followup discussion, it seems clearly that the answer really is "Yes, but we don't want to concede the point because it would cut through the long argument we are having." The only potentially actionable new thing today that I have heard is that *some* people (exact identity unclear) *might* be mollified if the *name* of the script proposed for encoding were designated "Old Canaanite", instead of "Phoenician" -- even though the intended coverage of particular historical attestations and styles would be identical in either case -- on the chance that it would appear more Semito-centric and less Greek-centric in its orientation. My reaction to that is that such a name change would be a sop to those who know enough to understand the issues of historical range and times and style differences anyway, namely the Semiticists to whom the terms "Proto-Canaanite", "Neo-Punic", "Ammonite", "Moabite", etc., actually signify. And it would fail to communicate to the rest of the potential users of the script, who may only know the term "Phoenician" and not the actual script historical complexities. Does that really buy anything for the encoding proposal that cannot simply be handled by annotation in the eventual introductory material describing the encoding? Everything else discussed today boils down to a long argument about whether *anything* at all should be encoded, or whether the entire proposal is superfluous. Now while I grant that the higher-order question as to *whether* a script should be encoded is logically prior to worrying about the details of the characters of that script to be encoded, once it is determined that it should be encoded at all, I'm detecting a great deal of speciousness in the argumentation that has been presented so far. I don't believe that anyone has any realistic technical objection to Michael's proposal in any detail, and since it is clear that failing any technical flaw the proposal will proceed to be approved by the character encoding committees, the alternative is to attack on the basis of a failure of consensus for the *need* for encoding the script. And in particular, to call into question the identity of Phoenician *as* a script. Well, we can then proceed to resolve those questions. But keep in mind the following observation: A consensus among *some* people that they do not have a need for an encoding does not constitute a consensus (for the encoding committees) that there is no need for an encoding. Back to the desert... --Ken
