John Hudson wrote:
Michael, Peter is not talking about the Phoenician language being represented in the Hebrew script, he is talking about the common practice of semiticists to *encode* the Phoenician script using Hebrew codepoints. The representation of the text is in Phoenician glyphs, not Hebrew, but these glyphs are treated as typeface variants of Hebrew.
At first, I too thought Peter was talking about transliteration into Hebrew script, but today I realised that he was talking about encoding Phoenician glyphs as Hebrew characters.
Are you sure about that? Peter, is this correct?
I'd been making the same assumption all along as well. In the way of corroboration, I have here Ze'ev Ben-áayyim's book "A Grammar of Samaritan Hebrew." Samaritans generally use their distinctive scripts, especially in their religious books, but Ben-áayyim writes *everything* with ordinary square Hebrew letters; there isn't a Samaritan-style base-glyph in the book, so far as I can tell (though he does show some Samaritan vowels on the square letters). This isn't exactly the same situation, and it is an isolated case, though.
~mark
