From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 20:21:24 EDT
Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 28/04/2004 21:50, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
>> ...
>> Samaritan (and likely Aramaic) you have to watch out for: unlike
>> "Phoenician" or ancient Canaanite, these have *modern* users who are
>> not academics, but people who use the scripts as living, working ways
>> of writing ordinary things. It isn't just scholars who need to be
>> heard on those. (yes, I am in touch with modern Samaritans including
>> a very prominent person in Samaritan culture for decades, and also
>> with a preëminent scholar of Samaritan manuscripts. We're working on
>> it).
>
>
>
> On Samaritan, I agree. But where are your modern users of a
> distinctive Aramaic script? Well, there is Syriac; and there is the
> Hebrew script which is often known among scholars as Aramaic script,
> to distinguish it from paleo-Hebrew, and because it was used for
> Aramaic before it was used for Hebrew. And Aramaic is also written in
> Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic and maybe other already defined scripts. But I
> have never seen any evidence of any other distinctive modern Aramaic
> script. If you or anyone has any, please let me know. If not, you
> should drop your "likely".
I was hedging my bets. I know that Aramaic, unlike Phoenician and Old
Canaanite, still has a few communities of modern users. Since Aramaic
was mentioned by some other people as being among the scripts possibly
to be disunified, for all I know there was still a distinctive Aramaic
script in use (apart from modern "Hebrew"). There may not be; I just
didn't want to ignore it in case there was.
~mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Apr 29 2004 - 20:54:54 EDT