On 04/05/2004 11:23, John Hudson wrote:
Christian Cooke wrote:
Surely a cipher is by definition "after the event", i.e. there must be the parent script before the child. ...
Well, Samaritan script is used as a cipher for English although arguably the Samaritan script is older than the Latin script. So it's not quite that simple.
... Does it not follow that, by John's reasoning, if one is no more than a cipher of the other then it is Hebrew that is the cipher and so the only way Phoenician and Hebrew can be unified (a suggestion you'll have to assume is suitably showered with smileys :-) is for the latter to be deprecated and the former encoded as the /real/ parent script?
The argument of at least some contributors to this discussion is that the "Hebrew' block is misnamed. Even if one accepts that 'Phoenician' should be separately encoded, the Hebrew block should have been called 'Aramaic' :)
Or that the Hebrew block should have been called West Semitic or something of the sort, which would unify Phoenician with Hebrew. No smileys, I'm serious. As I understand it, block names can be changed although individual character names cannot be. So the block could be renamed "Hebrew and Canaanite" or something of the sort.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
