At 12:40 -0700 2004-04-30, John Hudson wrote:
The people who have an issue with this do not recognise two distinct scripts, and they are not going to recognise two distinct scripts whether Unicode encodes them as such or not.
Scholars of writing systems have always recognized the distinction. No one teaches that "The Greek script is derived from the Unified Twenty-Two Character West Semitic Abjad." They teach that "The Greek script is derived from the Phoenician script." They certainly do not teach that "The Greek script is derived from the Hebrew script."
On the one hand, the obvious recommendation would be to tell semiticists to continue doing what they have been doing: encoding as Hebrew and displaying with Phoenician-style glyph variants, as this enables textual analysis and comparison with a larger body of Hebrew text in which such experts are likely to be interested.
Most of them don't bother with the Phoenician glyph variants, in my experience. When they want to read something easily, they write it in Hebrew script.
But your proposal specifically states that the 'Phoenician' characters should be used to encode Palaeo-Hebrew, as if somehow Hebrew and Hebrew are different languages when they look different.
No, John. The Palaeo-Hebrew script and the Hebrew script are different scripts. The Palaeo-Hebrew can be (and should be) unified with the Phoenician script; Jewish/Square Hebrew as used in Israel is a different script. The language has nothing to do with it.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
