Philippe Verdy wrote at 3:45 PM on Friday, April 30, 2004: >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.
You are grossly exaggerating the language differences here: Phoenician Hebrew 1st Millenium BC 2nd Millenium AD ykbd ykbd both = "he will honor" tbrk tbrk both = "she will bless" bqsh bqsh both = "he searched for" btm btm both = "houses" ... In fact, the differences between the West Semitic languages of ancient Canaan are often treated as dialectical differences. (And modern Israeli Hebrew can be viewed as a dialect of ancient Hebrew.) And don't forget that to an ancient Hebrew reader the Phoenician glyphs for all these characters are practically identical to the ancient Hebrew "counterparts". >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). This could easily be, and in fact is being, done right now via font specification. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
