On 22/05/2004 14:04, James Kass wrote:
...
Well, we are now being assured that people who want to encode Phoenician, palaeo-Hebrew etc as Unicode Hebrew will be quite free to do so indefinitely even if Phoenician is encoded.
There is no such assurance. The actual assurance is more like
'people who wish to transliterate ancient scripts into modern ones
are perfectly free to do so'. Indeed, how could it be otherwise?
As I understand it, what at least a number of Semitic scholars want to do is not to transliterate, but to represent Phoenician texts with Phoenician letters with the Unicode Hebrew characters, and fonts with Phoenician glyphs at the Hebrew character code points. In other words, to treat the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician as a font change, like the difference between Fraktur and normal Latin script. Will they be allowed to do that after a Phoenician block is defined, or will they not? If the answer is that they will not, this justifies the objection that a new Phoenician block interferes with the work of the real experts in the field, in order to meet the not very clearly defined requirements of a few non-experts.
OK, if you want to be picky, "Dr Kaufman's response makes it clear that to at least one professional in the field Everson's proposal is not just questionable but ridiculous." Snyder and Keown suggest that it is at least three, although I don't remember them actually using the word "ridiculous"....
My claim is that Kaufman is a top scholar of Aramaic, but not that he formally represents other scholars.
Your original post from which the claim might be inferred was:
"Dr Kaufman's response makes it clear that to professionals in the field Everson's proposal is not just questionable but ridiculous."
All I'd asked (sigh) is if Dr. Kaufman spoke only for himself, or if he claimed to speak for *all* professionals in the field.
The Phoenician proposal was offensive to him (as I see the situation), so he causes offence in return. It's called "tit-for-tat"....
He considers the proposal ridiculous, so he gets ridicule in return. It's called "tit-for-tat".
His posting as it appeared on the Unicode list was offensive. I thought Michael Kaplan did a fine job of responding to it.
On 20/05/2004 19:45, John Hudson wrote:
... There is no reason at all why Semiticists cannot simply totally ignore the proposed Phoenician block. The important question then, it seems to me, is not whether to encode Phoenician or not, but how to better communicate that the encoding of a particular set of characters does not mean that they have to be used to encode particular texts or languages.Would that the first sentence were true! As for the second sentence, if the UTC and others really agree that with this position, first this needs to be communicated to James Kass.
I don't have a problem with transliteration and I'm surprised that you seem to think I do.
I'm not talking about transliteration. See above.
The fear is rather that a few people, who are not true Semitic scholars, will embrace the new range, and by doing so will make things much harder for the majority who don't need and don't want the new encoding.
If only a few people would embrace the new range, how would such a 'fringe group' create problems for "true Semitic scholars"?
If a few people encode a significant number of texts according to their preferences, this implies a corpus in mixed encodings, which is what I am trying to avoid.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
