From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Wed Dec 24 2003 - 15:44:16 EST
At 12:29 -0800 2003-12-24, Elaine Keown wrote:
>It appears to me that script experts may resemble experts in
>dialects/languages: there are lumpers and splitters........
>
>I'm a lumper, but I am a thinking lumper....I will be thinking about
>Phoenician retrieval in early 2004....
There is zero chance that Phoenician will be considered to be a glyph
variant of Hebrew. Zero chance. The number of books about writing
systems, from children's books to books for adults, which contain
references to the Phoenician alphabet as the parent to both Etruscan
and Hebrew, are legion.
Some scholars may decide to transliterate all Phoenician texts into
Hebrew script and read only that, and retrieve it from their
databases, and that is perfectly fine. Lots of people transliterate
Sanskrit into Latin and never use Devanagari.
>I would be happy to inform Debbie. The font for the Samaritan
>marks is still in rough draft due to what I did in fall....
What "marks" are these?
>and I had confusing email from a Samaritan expert I consulted that needs to be
>processed.....(re vowels not unification)
Documents available to me suggest that Samaritan can (but needn't)
use Arabic fatha and kasra and others, and that there are
orthographies for which some letters are used vocalically, a bit like
Yiddish.
> > is clearly a different script from Hebrew.
>
>Different is in the eye of the beholder, I'm afraid. Or, if you
>will, in the eye of the cyber-machine....
No. It is a question of history and development.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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