From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Feb 22 2005 - 05:34:16 CST
On 22/02/2005 10:42, UList@dfa-mail.com wrote:
> ...
>
>ARCHAIC GREEK ALPHABETS
>...
>
>Archaic Greek alphabets (and some similar alphabets from Asia Minor) have a
>greater identity than just "glyph variants". They were in use for hundreds of
>years by incredibly important civilizations.
>
>They are as visually distinct from standard Greek script as Latin is -- a
>point that can be easily proven by the fact that "Latin script" is actually
>just one of those Archaic Greek alphabets (West Greek), with a few minor alterations.
>
>
There is a similar situation with north-west Semitic alphabets. There is
a considerable range of variations, mostly only glyph variations, of
the basic 22 letter alphabet; the texts represented are mostly in more
or less the same language. Some of these variants are roadmapped as
separate scripts, and others have been identified as possible candidates
for encoding. Most have rather small corpora. In my opinion it would
make a lot of sense to encode these variations as the basic script plus
a variation selector. This automatically allows the texts to be
processed for non-rendering purposes as equivalent to text in other
variants of the script, according to regular scholarly practice which
is to transliterate into Hebrew or Latin script. Encoding these variants
as a large number of separate scripts is a lot of work for many people
but doesn't actually help anyone.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 266.3.0 - Release Date: 21/02/2005
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