From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jul 14 2003 - 20:11:06 EDT
Peter Kirk asked:
> So is there a real justification for separate alphabets here?
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2311.pdf
And Michael Everson can, no doubt, provide further
justification beyond this sketch of how the roadmap has
been structured for this script family.
Note that when dealing with historic scripts it is not
possible to have a completely axiomatic approach to
determining what should or should not be designated
as distinct scripts for encoding. To a certain extant
it is an artform to discover what are the significant
periods and ranges of forms to "draw a box around" to
result in a sufficient set of encodings to match the
scholastic need for representation of textual data,
without erring either to the "lumping" side (just
encode Aramaic once) or on the "splitting" side (encode
each distinct local alphabet in each distinct,
identifiable time period).
Note also that decisions about what further Phoenician-derived
scripts to encode is also influenced by the fact that
for obvious modern reasons, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac
are already encoded as distinct scripts.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jul 14 2003 - 20:52:55 EDT