From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Dec 26 2003 - 09:57:16 EST
At 02:23 -0500 2003-12-26, Dean Snyder wrote:
>If you are thinking of chronology and mean that Phoenician came
>first, most scholars would agree with you.
I too am a scholar, Dean.
>But I would ask, so what? What does chronological priority have to
>do with establishing separate encodings?
The source of scripts and characters has often been a criterion for
their disunification. Ages ago I showed that the unification of YOGH
and EZH was incorrect because the two letters had different sources.
The same is true for scripts.
To sketch the relationships: Canaanite split into Phoenician and
Aramaic. Paleo-Hebrew derives from Phoenician, as does Samaritan.
Square Hebrew on the other hand derives from Aramaic. There are nodes
on this tree which we are proposing to investigate for encoding.
>Should Latin be separately encoded?
Latin *has* been separately encoded.
>On the other hand, if you mean that both Hebrew and Phoenician are
>not glyphic variants of the same script system, then I know of no
>scholar who would agree with you.
Every historian of writing describes the various scripts *as*
scripts, and recognizes them differently. We have bilinguals where
people are distinguishing the scripts in text; we have discussion,
for instance in the Babylonian Talmud, specifically discussing the
different writing systems as different. These scripts share a basic
structure, sure. But Phoenician a glyph variant of Square Hebrew?
Certainly not.
>Ancient Phoenician, Punic, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and Aramaic are
>different dialects and/or languages commonly written with the same right-
>to-left script system
Again here you are using a "term", "script system" in an undefined way.
>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.
The same can be said for the Indic and Philippine and other scripts,
yet we (properly) encoded them. Some of the nodes on the tree show
enough variation to warrant separate encoding. Research as to which
has not yet been completed apart from the initial work done in 1999
resulting in the current Roadmap.
>(For a sampling of ancient Phoenician, Moabite, and Hebrew glyphic
>variation see the attached script chart taken from Gibson's Textbook
>of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions - volume 2 has samples of Aramaic
>glyphic variants.)
There are many such charts; the resolution of the one you sent is not
sufficient to make use of it.
>I see no justification for separately encoding Phoenician.
Fine. I do, including but not limited to meta-discussion of writing
systems in a very large body of secondary literature.
>If you did encode it, where, and on what bases, then would you draw
>the lines for the separate encodings of the other ancient Northwest
>Semitic languages and periods (because that's what these are, other
>languages and periods, and not other scripts)?
This is the specific work we have not done yet, but it's not rocket
science. Students of writing are able to distinguish early Aramaic
from Phoenician because of certain characteristics in the ductus for
instance. Also there was the introduction of the matres lectionis. It
is a question of which nodes on the tree it makes sense to encode.
>What we have here is a continuum of glyphic variation within a
>single script system.
Here we have a range of related but distinct scripts. Compare
Khutsuri (comprising Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri) and Mkhedruli Georgian.
> >The number of books about writing systems, from children's books to books
> >for adults, which contain references to the Phoenician alphabet as the
> >parent to both Etruscan and Hebrew, are legion.
>
>Using the same reasoning, we should separately encode Latin, the
>parent script for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, ...
You appear to have reasoned about this matter in a different way than
I have, for what you suggest would not follow from what I have
suggested.
> >Some scholars may decide to transliterate all Phoenician texts into
>>Hebrew script and read only that, and retrieve it from their
>>databases, and that is perfectly fine. Lots of people transliterate
>>Sanskrit into Latin and never use Devanagari.
>
>By definition, one cannot "transliterate ... Phoenician texts into
>Hebrew script".
Of course you can.
>Unlike your example of Devanagari and Latin, Phoenician and Hebrew
>share a common script system.
You can transliterate Devanagari Sanskrit into Sinhala and Burmese,
which scripts share the same structure. Latin shares a different
structure, it is true.
>I think the real problem here arises from the fact that medieval and
>modern Hebrew, a superset of the ancient Hebrew script, with vowels,
>punctuation, and cantillation marks added to late glyphic variants of the
>22 ancient Northwest Semitic consonants, was encoded in Unicode without
>considering Phoenician, Aramaic, etc. at the same time, and now there is
>resistance to using Unicode characters with "Hebrew" in their names to
>write Phoenician, Aramaic, etc.
I think the "real problem" here arises from the fact that some
scholars, familiar with Hebrew, find it easier to read early Semitic
texts in square script than in the originals. The same thing happens
with Runic and Gothic and Glagolitic and Khutsuri, and indeed
Cuneiform, where Latin is often preferred (regardless of the
structure of the writing systems). The needs of those scholars is
met: they can use Hebrew and Latin with diacritics. No problem. The
needs of other clients of the Universal Character Set, no matter how
"unscholarly" they may be, will be met by encoding appropriate nodes
in the Semitic tree.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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