Re: Phoenician and Planetoid Sedna

From: E. Keown (k_isoetc@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue May 18 2004 - 13:35:00 CDT

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            Elaine Keown
            Tucson

    Hi,

    I waited to respond to the remarks below until I
    locked my flamethrower and grenades in the downstairs
    closet.....for several days.

    Mark Davis wrote:
    > 1. Michael has made some very good contributions to
    > the work of script encoding,

    I've come to appreciate Michael for the very first
    time as I look at Phoenician. I still disagree, but
    it's been stimulating. I would never have looked at
    RTL Greek or Minoan or the date for the Theran
    eruption on my own.

    Last night I learned that Phoenician is closer to
    Mishnaic Hebrew and Northern Biblical Hebrew.
    Phoenician is 'coastal Canaanite.'

    And Mark Davis also wrote:
    > And unless they are living in caves in the mountains
    > of Tibet, there is no reason for them not to be
    > aware of Unicode and its impact of the ability to
    > encode text on their

    You should actually think of Semitists and other
    specialists in Ancient Afroasiatic as living on
    Planetoid Sedna, the newest, furthest, and tiniest
    member of our solar system. Tibet is still on Terra,
    and Tibetan has been (exquisitely) done in Unicode.

    Sednan Semitists have an excellent view of Terra (see
    recent drawing Tuesday NYTimes Science section), but
    they are indeed in their own little world.

    This is a chicken-and-egg problem. There has never,
    at any point, been software which does what a Semitist
    would really need, what he does inside his (or her)
    brain as he (or she) translates, builds a dictionary,
    teaches advanced students, etc.

    A fellow student at Harvard Div told me an interesting
    story about my Mesopotamian history teacher. They
    took a proctored final exam together in Chicago. She
    got a stapled paper final.

    My history teacher opened a large envelope and took
    out an ancient brick covered with Akkadian cuneiform.

    His final was to translate as much of the brick as
    possible without a dictionary ......Elaine

            
                    
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