From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Sat May 08 2004 - 10:19:45 CDT
At 16:59 -0700 2004-05-07, E. Keown wrote:
>You seem to have learned a lot from Michael Everson. Your basic
>procedure is simply to ignore all objections and pretend they are
>stupid.
I have not ignored your objections. I have rejected them because they
are inadequate to the task of encoding all of the world's writing
systems in the Universal Character Set.
Professional Semiticists are not the only surviving cultural owners
of the world's Middle Eastern historical cultural heritage.
You can transliterate any text in the world in to Square Hebrew if it
makes you happy and makes sense to you. You're doing that now. Keep
on doing it.
But if Hellenicists, Indo-Europeanists, and script specialists see
"Phoenician" as the important, proximate source of the Greek writing
system, if they would *not* transliterate it into Hebrew, and if they
would like to see it encoded, since it would make it easier for them
represent Phoenician in texts about Greek, without having to resort
to hacks to prevent it from being represented as Square Hebrew, who
are Semiticists to say they are wrong?
The Universal Character Set is universal.
It appears that I sometimes have difficulty expressing *why* things
should be encoded. I'm not sure I can do much about that. I think I'm
a good judge of when to unify and when not to unify nevertheless.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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