From: Peter Kirk (peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 05:41:49 EDT
Thank you, Michael, Ken and others.
I wasn't aware that the Samaritan script is in current use. In that
case, and assuming that the modern users do not see this alphabet as a
variant of Hebrew (or Syriac or Arabic), it should indeed be encoded
separately in Unicode.
On the argument that the name of God is sometimes written in
paleo-Hebrew: surely this is simply a glyph variant. If I find a Latin
script Bible etc in which the name of God, and nothing else, is written
in italics - or in small caps which is actually a common practice - is
that justification for encoding a separate italic, or small caps, Latin
alphabet? Or perhaps this name of God can be considered as a special
glyph on its own, cf. U+FDF2. But I can see the argument that
paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician are sufficiently different from prototypical
Hebrew that they should be considered a separate script. On the other
hand, modern handwritten Hebrew is probably at least as different from
prototypical Hebrew, and may even be separately derived from ancient
Phoenician via paleo-Hebrew.
It seems to me that the case is much less clear for Aramaic. The glyphs
proposed in http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2042.pdf (which is
linked to from the roadmap) are apparently the Palmyrene ones from
figure 5.5 column XVIII of
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2311.pdf. A comparison of these
with the Hebrew square characters in column XVII, and with the
prototypical Unicode glyphs for Hebrew, shows significant differences in
only 3-4 letters. The same seems to be true of the Nabatean script,
although some of the variants given show tendencies towards Arabic as
well. These kinds of differences seem to me within the acceptable
boundaries of font changes. Again the differences from prototypical
Hebrew are less than between modern handwritten Hebrew and prototypical
Hebrew.
I would agree with John that it would be good to have input from Hebrew
readers on this. I have added Hebrew to the subject line in the hope of
attracting some attention.
-- Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk@ntlworld.com http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jul 15 2003 - 06:28:25 EDT