Semiticists could, if they so wish, establish a de facto rule that they will drum anyone clear out of the discipline if they encounter any professional Semiticist daring to use Phoenician letters to represent Palaeo-Hebrew text. Frankly, I doubt it will come to that.
--- I think it can quite easily, and it would be to the benefit of the Semiticist community if it did. They want all Modern and Ancient Hebrew, Moabite, etc. text they have access to to be searchable with the same string of characters? Then they as a discipline refuse to issue or circulate fonts with the Phoenecian code range, to post texts online in Phoenecian encoding, and to accept journal articles in Phoenecian encoding. They are fully within their rights to do so, even Michael has admitted this; and I would encourage them to do just that.
At any rate, what is being sidestepped here (or rather, acknowledged but dismissed) is that the notion of script identity is political (not just religious). Coptic could have stayed unified with Greek, and myself I'm still not convinced the distinction between Greek and Coptic in bilingual editions is not truly just a font issue. But disunifying Coptic was a political imperative, required by the appropriate scholarly body of users. Unifying the Semitic abjads is another political imperative by a scholarly body of users. So the question again becomes, not whether the scripts are historically or graphemically distinct, but what the body of users is that wants them disunified. Peter C has asked this, but Michael has already answered this, and (was it John Hudson?) has already questioned it: historians of the alphabet (but how are their presentations of abjads and abecedaria truly text as opposed to graphics?), palaeographers (but their end product is likely going to be Hebrew-encoded, given the discipline encompassing them --- and if they're talking about glyphs as opposed to text, again this is truly graphics rather than text), and linguistic and palaeographical paedagogy (ditto, and a usage the scholars would tend to regard as marginal). And the "fonts are k00l" crowd of enthusiasts :-) which the review of hieroglyphics has already mentioned; and I know we shouldn't dismiss them out of hand and all, but why can't they be accommodated by a font switch too?
Sure the script could be regarded as distinct historically; it's just not clear how expedient it is to do so.
Not that I'm being helpful or anything...
P.S. If we could have Phoenecian decompose to Hebrew or vice versa, we wouldn't have a problem. But refusing to add further decompositions is yet another political imperative. :-)
-- Nick Nicholas, French/Italian/Spanish, Dera me xhama t"e larm"e, Univ. Melbourne [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dera mbas blerimit http://www.opoudjis.net Me xhama t"e larm"e! In case you're wondering: Lumtunia nuk ka ngjyra tjera. the poem is in Albanian. (Martin Camaj, _Nj"e Shp'i e Vetme_)
