From: John Cowan (cowan@ccil.org)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 21:54:02 CDT
Michael Everson scripsit:
> 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.
Greek doesn't derive from Square Hebrew, and I never claimed it did.
Greek does derive from some variant of the 22CWSA, posssibly (but not
provably) the ones used to write the Phoenician language.
> 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.
And Torah scrolls have to be handwritten (with no marks except the puncta
extraordinaria) too. That doesn't make Square handwriting a separate
script.
> 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.
I'm not addressing Brahmi today.
> 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.
Structurally, Syriac is separate because of its shaping behavior.
I believe Samaritan should not be separately encoded either, though
since it is a current-use script I concede that there may be a need
for this.
-- Do what you will, John Cowan this Life's a Fiction jcowan@reutershealth.com And is made up of http://www.reutershealth.com Contradiction. --William Blake http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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