Hi Patrick,
PD> One small correction and one question.
And one quick and very cursory answer, mainly because it's three in
the morning :-)
>> - Ge'ez: Ge'ez is not used anymore except for liturgical purposes, so
>> I'd consider it a bit problematic to specify a country where it's
>> spoken. I'd probably remove the "Eritrea, Ethiopia" country
>> specification.
PD> Ge'ez is also used in comparative Semitic linguistics (primarily by
PD> biblical and ANE scholars). See Thomas O. Lambdin "Introduction to
PD> Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez)", Harvard Semitic Studies, vol. 24, Scholars
PD> Press, 1978.
This is right, of course, in so far as Ge'ez is an important language
within comparative Semitic studies. However, as far as I understand
the language list under discussion here, it encompasses languages as
they are spoken. If this distinction is not made, then the concept of
the entire list will have to be altered a bit; for example, for
practically every single language in the list one would have to add
the script "Latin" because it is most probably being used in some
Latin transcription or the other within linguistic studies of the
respective language. Imagine an entry like:
"Akkadian - Cuneiform (1), Latin - Mesopotamia, Europe, USA."
(Akkadian is studied elsewhere as well, I know :-))
In addition, then it makes even less sense to specify countries for
dead/liturgical/etc. (i.e. not used in everyday conversation)
languages since most scientific activity in comparative linguistics
(at least in Semitics) takes place outside of the area of origin of
the respective language.
On a side note of course it would by now probably make sense
to add "Latin" as alphabet to Chinese as well since hanyu pinyin has
been adopted as some sort of official latinization system by the
Chinese government, but that's an entirely different matter.
>> - Samaritan: Samaritan script is quite close to already-encodable
>> scripts, so that it would probably be possible to use smart fonts
>> (e.g. OpenType) to encode it using Hebrew.
PD> Not sure about the pointing for Samaritan. Have you compared the sign
PD> list that appears in "A Grammar of Samaritan Hebrew" by Ze'ev Ben-Hayyim
PD> with assitance from Abraham Tal, Magnes Press, Jerusalem, Eisenbrauns,
PD> Winona Lake, Indiana, to the Hebrew character set in 3.1? (I have only
PD> made a cursory scan before replying. Too many other duties to do a
PD> detailed comparison in the next several days. Mapping the pointing looks
PD> problematic.)
On a cursory cross-check, I see that pointing is a problem. As far I
can see and as opposed to what I said in my previous mail, simply
mapping Samaritan to 3.1 Hebrew probably would not work to a degree
serving scientific needs, and that's probably the main field where
Samaritan is needed nowadays. However, I wouldn't handle this by
adding Samaritan as an extra alphabet, though; just adding the extra
glyphs would seem to make more sense to me. The whole ancient Aramaic
group of languages could be handled more easily that way rather than
by specifying individual alphabets for the different styles of writing
(e.g. Nabatean, Palmyrene, Middle Persian [in this case, additions to
Syriac would probably seem more feasible though] and so on). I can't
crosscheck this in all the details at home now, however, and won't
probably have the time over the next week, but I don't think it's that
pressing either.
Have a nice day
Philipp mailto:uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de
__________________________
Chaos reigns within / Reflect, repent, and reboot / Order shall return
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