At 13:45 -0700 2004-04-28, Peter Kirk wrote:
The best argument that Michael has is that Phoenician glyphs look very different from Hebrew glyphs.
And the etymology. We have taken the historical origin of letters and scripts to be a criterion for disunification. YOGH and EZH is one example.
But the variation of some Latin and Cyrillic letters can be just as great.
Unsupported assertion. You don't have anything like the difference between a single-stroke Hebrew YOD and a three-pronged Phoenician YOD between Cyrillic and Latin.
For that matter, modern cursive Hebrew is almost as far from reference glyph Hebrew as Phoenician is (and quite illegible to me!), but no one has proposed encoding it separately.
That's true for cursive *anything*, really. for most of cursive modern Hebrew the ductus-origin of the shapes is clear enough if you pay attention.
Perhaps the Hebrew list is the best place to discuss the distinction between Hebrew and Phoenician.
I don't think so. Phoenician and Hebrew are different scripts. ;-) -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
