From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu May 27 2004 - 15:23:22 CDT
Peter Constable wrote:
> But if one can only
> point to cases of (say) documents from a given community containing 0
> and .6, or 0 and .9, then it would seem that the nodes had some
> conceptual validity within that community.
I don't doubt that nodes had 'conceptual validity' in the ancient community, but what was
the concept? We subdivide the writing of the Latin script into historical and regional
nodes (themselves open to dispute), but we recognise only a single script. I think Simon
Montagu made the point regarding the 'conceptual validity' of the nodes very well today:
...the limited evidence seems to suggest that Palaeo-Hebrew
and Square Hebrew were viewed as font variants by Hebrew
speakers 2,000 years ago, and as separate scripts by Hebrew
speakers today.
Of course the term 'font variant' is anachronistic, but Simon's observation captures the
essence of the shift from seeing two styles of the same semtitic script to seeing two
different scripts. If nothing else, this should help us understand why any insistence on
the identity of these scripts as being either obviously unified or obviously distinct is
unlikely to get us anywhere. The identity very much depends on the perspective of the
observer.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill White Mughals, by William Dalrymple Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 27 2004 - 15:24:15 CDT