From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 20:59:36 CDT
At 21:44 -0400 2004-05-02, John Cowan wrote:
>jameskass@att.net scripsit:
>
>> If Phoenician is considered a glyphic variation of modern Hebrew, then
>> it can also be considered a glyphic variation of modern Greek.
>
>Greek is descended from the 22CWSA, but its alphabet is *not* the 22CWSA
>structurally.
You can say this over and over and over again, John, and it doesn't
make a unification of Phoenician with its daughter-via-Aramaic Square
Hebrew a reasonable unification. Greek does not derive from glyph
variants of Hebrew script. The Greek script derives from Phoenician
script. The Greeks recognized it.
The native users of the Phoenician-based Palaeo-Hebrew and the later
Aramaic-based Jewish/Square Hebrew scripts considered them to be
completely different scripts, so much so that one is considered
appropriate for printing sacred texts and the other one is not.
This is not mere font switching.
Any number of Brahmic scripts have been encoded, and not just because
here or there they show some "structural" uniqueness. Brahmi is a
true subset of Devanagari. And Bengali. And Myanmar.
The Phoenician repertoire is a true subset of the Hebrew. And Syriac.
And Samaritan. Indeed, the glyphic resemblance between Samaritan and
Phoenician is far closer than that of Hebrew and Phoenician.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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