At 11:06 -0700 2004-05-02, Peter Kirk wrote:
Michael Everson, who knows so little Phoenician that he doesn't know how similar it is to Hebrew?
You are confusing language and script. I am not encoding the Phoenician language. I am encoding a set of genetically related scripts with similar behaviours, which differ from Hebrew in shape (but which are similar in shape themselves) and in function (Hebrew has grown enormously complex with its representation. I believe that if you take a pointed and cantillated Hebrew text and were to change the "font" to "Phoenician" you would end up with something that is, plain and simply, utterly wrong.
James Kass, who doesn't know that "in Phoenician" means "in the Phoenician language" rather than "in Phoenician script"?
James Kass' reputation for solid thinking on Unicode matters remains unsullied as far as I am concerned, despite your mud-slinging. James understands the difference between language and script quite well.
Anyone else? Perhaps one or two, and no evidence for a "group". Not nearly as many as want Klingon encoded. Do they have an actual use for the script?
It is a Universal Character Set. It is not a character set for Certain Kinds of Semiticists Who Think That Everything Is Hebrew. The Phoenician script has other clients. Runic has specialist and non-specialist clients. Gothic has specialist and non-specialist clients. Egyptian has specialist and non-specialist clients.
Children learning about the history of their alphabets are arguably more important than narrow-minded pendants who think that by bluster they can detract us from our goal.
Which is to encode all of the world's writing systems in a Universal Character Set.
Have they demonstrated a need for it or that, if encoded, anyone will actually use it? Surely these are the criteria for encoding a script, not just that one person has asked for it to be encoded and a few have supported him.
I guess it is just a misapprehension on your part about what you will be "forced" to do.
Let's rehearse it again.
Most Germanicists prefer to transliterate Gothic text into Latin to work with it, to study it, to publish it, to read it. We encoded Gothic anyway, because it is a separate script from Greek.
Most Germanicists prefer to transliterate Runic text into Latin to work with it, to study it, to publish it, to read it. We encoded Runic anyway, doubtless to the joy of adolescent Dungeons-and-Dragons players everywhere.
Most Semiticists (you claim) prefer to transliterate Phoenician (and other language) text into Hebrew (or Latin) to work with it, to study it, to publish it, to read it. We should encode the Phoenician
family of scripts anyway, because
Your claim that Phoenican is just a subset of Hebrew ignores the historical facts of the development of the Hebrew script, in particular with regard to the development of related scripts like Samaritan. The unification which we did for Phoenician correctly rounds up like with like, and leaves specialized branches of the West Semitic writing systems (like Hebrew and Samaritan) alone as separate scripts.
"Need" is more than just "want". I am thinking of people who would actually use this encoding, who would prefer to use it, and who are not adequately provided for by existing solutions e.g. using the Hebrew script.
A font hack is a font hack, whether the Phoenician glyphs are hacked onto Latin characters or whether they are hacked onto Hebrew characters. I have plenty of Phoenician fonts hacked onto Latin characters (showing the need for developers who are NOT Semiticists, perhaps, to write Phoenician letters)
But I have said that before.
Well, the only people known to me to support this encoding are members of this list. The proposer has not provided in the proposal the names of anyone else or any other information about anyone else.
Perhaps I will improve the bibliography. I have abundant text from historians of writing systems which clearly distinguish Hebrew and Phoenician scripts. Some of those historians of writing systems are dead. Some long dead.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
