From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Unifying Phoenician and Hebrew would be akin to unifying > Katakana and Hiragana. *That* would be silly.
One good argument in favor of not unifying Phoenician and Hebrew, which are in a situation comparable to Hiragana and Katakana, with one set having a onen-to-one match to the other. This unification would have lost text semantic in Japanese, because either Hiragana or Katakana alone cannot represent some semantic distinctions between what is a "native" Japanese word and a transliterated foreign word. The script distinction allows semantic distinctions. Suppose that a modern Hebrew text is speaking about Phoenician words, the script distinction is not only a matter of style but carries semantic distinctions as well, as they are distinct languages. It's obvious that a modern Hebrew reader will not be able to decipher a Phoenician word, and even understand it if it is transliterated to the Hebrew script. Even though there's a continuum here, having the choice between a historic script and the modern Hebrew script will be useful to allow writing texts with mixed scripts (notably for didactic purposes, and vulgarization books). Without the distinction in the code, it will be difficult to read a text using mixed scripts unified with the same Unicode code points. Modern Hebrew with its pointed extension for historic religious texts is already complex enough without adding new historic script styles to that complexity. Phoenician may appears simple today, but it is likely to be extended to cover a broad and complex range of historic texts which have nothing in common with Hebrew. It may even be possible that some branches be disunified to cover the case of left-to-right scripts or early ancesters of Greek, or the case of early Brahmi and Arabic scripts. This disunification will be obvious by the choice of the representative glyphs. One day the Hebrew script will need to be stabilized to work correctly with modern and Biblic usages. Then writers and scholars will have the choice between the best scripts to use to represent the printed texts. I quite sure that each branch will have their distinctive orthographic system, their own sets of properties, etc... even if there's a superficial one-to-one mapping from one to the other. That's what was done for Greek and Cyrillic, disunified from Latin as it really helps language identification and simplifies text processing. A too broad unification for characters that already are not immediately identifiable by their apparent glyph identity will just create a nightmare. Now suppose that an author wants to use a Hebrew transliteration: he can do so quite easily, but he will also make sure that the text is correctly rendered and interpreted with the Hebrew script. A phoenician author will have difficulties to create a text which will be rendered correctly in all the many variants of the scripts. He will concentrate his efforts in only one of these script "variants", and this will help improve the studies of these old scripts. At any time, in each script branch, there will be some refinements to add a few script-specific diacritics and marks or even plain vowel letters, which won't have any correspondance in the Hebrew script. If we unifiy Phoenician with Hebrew too early, it will become nearly impossible to introduce new vowels or newer left-to-right layouts, because the Hebrew script will become too complex to handle correctly with these additions. Let's keep Hebrew clean with only modern Hebrew and traditional pointed Hebrew... The religious traditions in Hebrew are too strong to allow importing into it some variants and marks coming from separate Phoenitic branches used by non-Hebrew languages. The simple one-to-one mapping will still be possible for the most direct ancestors of Hebrew, but this will not work with lots of Phoenitic branches from which Hebrew is not an ancestor or child.
