From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri May 14 2004 - 10:54:57 CDT
At 06:35 -0700 2004-05-14, Peter Kirk wrote:
>But there is an exceptional issue within the family of north-west
>Semitic scripts, which may apply also to others e.g. Greek, Coptic
>and archaic Greek - possibly also the Indic scripts.
I don't think so.
>Within these sets of scripts there is NO ambiguity about which
>characters correspond to which, as they have identical repertoires,
>with possibly additional letters in some of the scripts for which no
>equivalent can be defined in the other scripts.
That doesn't mean that an ordered list with them interfiled is in any
way legible.
>For such cases, in my opinion, a good case can be made for
>interfiling the scripts in the default algorithm.
I disagree.
>The major advantage of doing this is to allow integrated searching
>of text corpora in which texts have been encoded in more than one
>script.
As I keep saying, Phoenician-language texts are already encoded in
Hebrew script and in Latin script, so this "advantage" is already
excluded.
>If the Unicode staff are now saying that it is OK to write
>Phoenician either with Hebrew characters masquerading as Phoenician
>or with the proposed Phoenician block, that opens the way to
>perpetuation of the confusion which existed before Unicode.
Before Coptic was disunified from Greek, all you could do was use
Greek (or PUA) code points for the Coptic; that is one of the costs
of disunification. The same goes for the Nuskhuri/Mkhedruli
disunification.
>It really would be far better, in the long run, if you said openly
>that anyone who continues to write Phoenician with Hebrew characters
>after the new block is accepted is wrong and breaking the standard,
>and should change their practices immediately.
Currently, Phoenician fonts I have seen have *all* been Latin-based,
not Hebrew, but I personally believe it would be correct to encode
Phoenician-language texts in Phoenician script with the
Phoenician-specific code points (unless you want to transliterate it
into Hebrew or Latin or Syriac or whatever).
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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