Re: Updated Phoenician proposal: confidential?

[Peter Kirk]

On 02/06/2004 11:36, Rick McGowan wrote:
Peter Kirk wrote...

... I suppose he didn't want to put his proposal at risk by 
describing how the user community was, at least in part, opposed to 
the proposal.

That imputes to him a motive that I doubt he had. My impression is 
that Michael didn't know there would be such violent opposition, or 
indeed *any* opposition, when he posted it.

    Rick
There was a discussion of Phoenician and Aramaic on this list 14-16 July 
2003, in which Michael took part, and in which some opposition to 
separate encoding of Phoenician was expressed. In late December 2003 
there was a further and lengthy discussion of Aramaic and other NW 
Semitic scripts on the Hebrew list (and partly copied to this list), and 
again Michael took part. In both discussions, especially the latter, the 
point was made clearly that many users consider Phoenician and 
palaeo-Hebrew to be glyph variants of Hebrew.

For example, on 25 December 2003 Dean Snyder wrote:
Ancient Phoenician, Punic, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and Aramaic are different 
dialects and/or languages commonly written with the same right-to-left script system 
containing the same 22 non-numeric characters and exhibiting no more glyphic variation 
over a period of a thousand years than that seen in the various manifestations of the 
Latin alphabet. ... I see no justification for separately encoding Phoenician. ... 
What we have here is a continuum of glyphic variation within a single script system.
On 24 December 2003 Elaine Keown replied to Michael Everson:
There is zero chance that Phoenician will be
considered to be a glyph variant of Hebrew. 
   

Many, many Semitists would be truly astonished to read
this sentence.
 

There is plenty more like this, but this evidence, publicly available in 
the archives, is more than adequate to demonstrate that Michael had been 
in contact with users of Phoenician and palaeo-Hebrew and was well aware 
that his proposal was highly controversial and not acceptable to many 
scholars of Semitic languages.

On 22 December 2003 Michael Everson wrote to me on the Hebrew list, re a 
proposed review of the Semitic scripts on the roadmap:

Please do not force us to undertake this review NOW. We do not have 
the resources to do so effectively and already this thread has taken 
up far too much time and energy. We have explained to you that nothing 
actionable is happening with any of this material at present. How many 
times do I have to say that?
Well, maybe "at present" meant now rather than four months later, but it 
does seem strange that so soon after repeating that he had no such 
intentions Michael found time and energy to propose Phoenician.

You, Rick, also replied on 22 December 2003 to the same posting of mine, 
so you can't claim to be ignorant of this discussion. You wrote:

You can't just "call for a review" and expect anything to happen. Please  
dcument your opinions and document some facts. If you have a different  
model of Aramaic, Phoenician, and related scripts, then you should write up  
a formal paper with appropriate references, evidence, and supporting  
documentation, and explain what you think is an appropriate model, and get  
some scholarly buy-in from people who study those scripts. Submit that to  
UTC for discussion.

I didn't do say because you and Michael both denied any intention to 
proceed with such proposals in the near future. Would this kind of paper 
still be appropriate? There is of course little time to prepare anything 
before the UTC meeting.

On 24 December 2003 Michael Everson wrote:
I do, however, oppose overunification when it is warranted to do so. 
At the same time it takes time to do that. It took a great deal of 
time to disunify Coptic from Greek and Nuskhuri from Mkhedruli. I do 
NOT want to have to do that again with a hasty overunification of 
early Semitic alphabets.

I agree. But I am also opposed to hasty disunification, because that 
cannot be undone at all (although I suppose a new Phoenician script 
could be deprecated). This subject requires full and clear debate. It is 
most unfortunate that the debate which some of us have attempted to have 
on this list has become derailed because technical questions have been 
misinterpreted as ad hominem attacks. I accept that I am partly at fault 
for not being as clear as I might have been, and for responding 
inappropriately to some ad hominem replies. But there does seem to have 
been a serious lack of technical argumentation in favour of the 
proposal, especially from the proposer.

On 02/06/2004 12:03, Peter Constable wrote:
...
Well, the Phoenician proposal fits with the second sentence here, but
   

it
 

seems to have totally ignored the first sentence: the scholarly needs
   

as
 

expressed by the majority of scholars of the proposed script as
   

reported
 

on this list have apparently been rejected as irrelevant.
   

This is utterly false. It assumes a premise that is completely invalid:
that the only want to accommodate the need of Semitic scholars is to
reject a proposal for distinct encoding of PH. It has repeatedly been
stated / explained / demonstrated that distinct encoding of PH does not
imply that the needs of Semitic cannot be served.
 

I should clarify. I was trying to avoid anything that looked personal. 
But my point was that the original proposer apparently rejected 
scholarly needs as irrelevant. There is no mention of them in the 
proposal, and I don't recall the proposer making any comments accepting 
that the needs of the scholarly community should be responded to. Others 
on this list have argued that there is no incompatibility between 
separate encoding and scholarly needs. I accept that this argument has 
been put forward, but I don't accept it.

By the way, anyone interested in this thread may be interested in 
http://www.stephenbroyles.com/Izbet%20Sartah.htm, especially the image 
which shows (on its bottom line) a 22 character Semitic alphabet, 
written left to right (and with the fifth letter looking remarkably like 
its modern equivalent E!). This is technically proto-Canaanite, which I 
think Michael has already dropped from the Phoenician proposal, but 
several glyphs are similar to later Phoenician.

--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/