From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun May 23 2004 - 12:54:38 CDT
From: "saqqara" <saqqara@csi.com>
> For Unicode, implementation of Phoenician as a font switch for Hebrew as an
> alternative proposal fails at the first hurdle if, as is claimed by some
> here, modern Hebrew readers do not regard Phoenician fonts as valid Hebrew
> fonts (in the sense that an English/Latin reader would acknowledge older
> cursive and type styles as valid and readable, if sometimes odd and
> unfamiliar). At least thats how I read the arguments about unification. So
> this is an important issue to address in a counter-proposal, although not
> the only one.
Personnaly I have some difficulties to read English text rendered with LTR
Phoenician, but it's still recognizable that this is English and with little
efforts I can read it, because the letter shapes are probably nearer from Greek
and Latin than to modern square Hebrew (there are many arguments that show that
RTL Phoenician is hard to read by modern Hebrew readers that may even think that
it is a tweaked Latin font with a strange presentation)...
There's probably no doubt that representative Phoenician glyphs shown in the
Michael report are too far from Arabic or other Semitic or Indic script.
My opinion here is that Phoenician would unify more easily with Greek or Coptic
than with Hebrew... What is unique in Phoenician is that it has a weak
directionality (can be written in either direction, although RTL is probably
more common and corresponds to the most important sources of usage in old sacred
texts from which semitic script familiess for Aramaic or Early Hebrew have
genetic relations).
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