From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 16:51:15 EDT
Michael Everson wrote:
> Students of various alphabet and writing systems, and authors of
> educational and historical materials. Read the document, please. Look at
> the bibliography. The Phoenician script has been recognized and
> published about as a separate unique entity in those contexts for a
> very, very long time indeed. That is a different user community from
> students of ancient Semitic languages, and it is a real user community.
I'm familiar with a number of the books in Michael's bibliography, and I think it should
be noted that the use of the term Phoenecian may often reflect the Greco-centric tradition
of much European writing on the subject. The script is commonly called Phoenician because
the Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenicians -- as every schoolboy learns --: sea
traders who spread their writing system around the eastern Mediterranean.
I wonder if some of the objections from Semiticists -- and I note that both Dean and Mark
are not opposing the Phoencician proposal per se, only expressing concerns about what is
or is not or may be unified in it -- might stem from their looking at this script in a
different context, in which its use is not specifically linked to the Phoenicians and in
which its place in a continuum of structurally identical and graphically related writing
systems is more obvious.
It is in light of this that I wonder whether the proposal might elicit less objection if
the name were changed to make clear that a number of closely related ancient Near-Eastern
writing systems are unified in the proposal.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com I often play against man, God says, but it is he who wants to lose, the idiot, and it is I who want him to win. And I succeed sometimes In making him win. - Charles Peguy
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