Dean Snyder wrote, > 1) The script is wrongly called "Phoenician" - the same script was used > for Old Phoenician, Old Aramaic, Old Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and > Edomite. That is why I propose it be named "[Old] Canaanite".
The Latin script is used for English, German, Tahitian, Apache, etc.. But it remains the Latin script. Likewise, Phoenician is Phoenician, even if other users borrowed it. Dean Snyder wrote, > Then why were Chinese, Japanese, and Korean unified? They weren't. There are three distinctive writing systems involved with CJK. They share some common ideographs and this is where some unification has been involved. In the case of ideographic unification, one can look at the glyphs involved and clearly observe the similarity. This is not so with Phoenician and Hebrew, clearly. Unifying Phoenician and Hebrew would be akin to unifying Katakana and Hiragana. *That* would be silly. Peter Kirk wrote in response to Chris Fynn's Telugu/Kannada comparison: > Yes, but two wrongs don't make a right. One past mistake of Unicode, or > decision it had to take for compatibility reasons, does not create a > precedent. Treating Telugu and Kannada as distinct scripts was not a mistake. Peter Kirk wrote, > Not really. Acceptance of the proposal would create an expectation that > Phoenician texts should be encoded with the new Phoenician characters, > and so that existing practices are wrong and should be changed. Not necessarily. The existence of a Cyrillic range doesn't preclude Latin script users from writing "Trotsky". > ...That > expectation is of course not acceptable to scholars. Also not acceptable > is the inevitable result that Phoenician texts will be encoded in two > different ways, leading to lack of searchability and potentially total > confusion. Chris Fynn previously pointed out a similar issue with Sanskrit texts written in various Indic scripts. Having one language encoded in more than one script is not unprecedented. Search features can just be programmed accordingly. > If there is such a small minority, let us hear from them. As far as I > know this is a minority of one. Please. When the Phoenician script is approved, I will post a hypertext version of the Meshe Stele. ( http://home.att.net/~jameskass/phoeniciantest.htm ) John Hudson provided this scan: > http://www.tiro.com/view/NorthSemitic.jpg ...which shows the Phoenician script at various stages. It's a bit misleading, though. If the only available reference were this scan, we could infer that, although the Phoenician language used the letters K, L, and M from 975 to 930 B.C.E., these letters were dropped from the language by 900 B.C.E. only to be added back into the repertoire by the Moabites around 830 B.C.E.. Quoting Birnbaum from John Hudson's letter: > To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the > Hebrews is hardly suitable. I have therefore coined the > term Palaeo-Hebrew. In one sense, it is OK to call Phoenician a "Hebrew script", since Phoenician was used to write Hebrew. In another sense, calling Phoenician a "Hebrew script" would be just as incorrect as calling the Phoenicians "Hebrews". To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Phoenicians seems eminently suitable. Best regards, James Kass
