From: John Cowan (cowan@ccil.org)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 07:56:08 CDT
Michael Everson scripsit:
> You can buy books to teach you how to learn Sütterlin. Germans who
> don't read Sütterlin recognize it as what it is -- a hard-to-read way
> that everyone used to write German not so long ago.
Sure. At some point, the same was true of Palaeo-Hebrew and
Square Hebrew, no doubt. Jews returning from Babylonian
exile with their nifty new Aramaic-style glyphs probably
saw PH inscriptions around them here and there.
> Phoenician script, on the other hand, is so different that its use
> renders a ritual scroll unclean.
Everson Monotype Hebrew glyphs would render it unclean as well.
> What? No chance. On Mac OS for instance, if the font didn't have glyphs,
> they would be substituted from a Hebrew font which did or with the
> Last Resort Font.
And if the font contained explicit glyphs of zero width, what then?
> If you unify PHOENICIAN QOP with HEBREW KOP (because, according to you,
> Phoenician is just a font variant of Hebrew) it will be reasonable
> for people to expect the right Hebrew behaviours, such as display.
Within the scope of the subset actually required for Phoenician,
certainly. I wouldn't expect a Trajan's Column font to have glyphs --
still less reference glyphs, with their totally inappropriate style --
for thorn, for example.
> Either way, pointed and cantillated text displayed in a Phoenician
> font is a JOKE at best.
Probably. So is Q with dagesh, though it's equally legal Unicode.
Why be so concerned about a borderline case? People who encode
Phoenician, whether they use the Hebrew codepoints or not, are
not likely to litter it with unhistorical points and cantillations.
-- If you understand, John Cowan things are just as they are; http://www.ccil.org/~cowan if you do not understand, http://www.reutershealth.com things are just as they are. jcowan@reutershealth.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 07 2004 - 18:45:25 CDT