From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Mon May 24 2004 - 15:50:15 CDT
At 12:38 -0700 2004-05-24, John Hudson wrote:
>Michael Everson wrote:
>
>>> The numerous and visually varied 22-letter semitic writing
>>> systems all represent the same 22 abstract characters.
>>>
>>> The Unicode Standard encodes abstract characters.
>>>
>>> Ergo, only one set of codepoints is required to encode the
>>> 22-letter semitic writing systems.
>
>>Oh, goody. Back to square 1.
>
>To clarify: I was not positing this syllogism as a new argument,
>only seeking to express as succinctly as possible the underlying
>logic of the opposition to the Phoenician proposal. I don't think
>this logic is at all unreasonable, any more than I think many of the
>arguments in favour of the proposal are unreasonable.
Fine. The counter-argument was given, but it was deleted by you:
A strong tradition of scholarship considers Phoenician to be
antecedent to a number of scripts, including Greek and the form of
Aramaic which gave rise to Square Hebrew (which has given rise to a
great typographic tradition of its own). That tradition does not
consider all of these numerous and visually-varied 22-letter Semitic
writing systems to be abstract glyph variants of a single underlying
structure. It distinguishes them clearly in the same "some of these
things are not like the others" way that is a criterion for plain
text representation, certainly for the group of scholars -- and
educators and other enthusiasts -- which makes this distinction.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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