From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Fri Dec 26 2003 - 13:36:51 EST
On 12/26/03 09:57, Michael Everson wrote:
> 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.
This is a particularly cogent point. The Mishna (c. 1st century C.E.)
does explicitly distinguish between Paleo-Hebrew and Square Hebrew
(tractate Yadayim 4:5). That's not a font-difference, that's a
script-difference, I think. This stated in the same sentence as
distinguishing Hebrew Scriptures written down in Aramaic translation and
Aramaic Scriptures (Daniel, Ezra) written down in Hebrew translation.
So it's seen as a parallel to the language. This one's tough to argue,
except to note that we don't have to satisfy first-century Rabbis at the
moment.
> 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.
This is the other really significant point: Semitic scholars may all
agree, but all the world is not Semitic scholarship, and non-{Semitic
scholars} have to be satisfied as well. Since the Semitic scholars are
also getting what they want, where's the harm in encoding more
alphabets? It's not *that* simple: one could argue (as is being done)
that more alphabets would lead to confusion about which one should be
used, and mess up searches. I guess we'd just have to make sure that
people doing scholarly work in Semitic languages know to use Hebrew all
the time (they already know that), no matter what the language. And in
cases where material is to be incorporated from non-scholarly sources
who used another alphabet, that can be transcoded when entered into
databases to keep them uniform if that's what's necessary, but
presumably that wouldn't happen often.
~mark
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