Re: Script variants and compatibility equivalence, was: Response to Everson Phoenician and why June 7?

From: Patrick Durusau (pdurusau@emory.edu)
Date: Sun Jun 06 2004 - 16:38:55 CDT

  • Next message: Curtis Clark: "Re: Revised Phoenician proposal"

    Peter,

    Peter Kirk wrote:
    > On 05/06/2004 08:25, John Hudson wrote:
    >
    >> Peter Kirk wrote:
    >>
    >>>> All Hudson is pointing out is that long PRIOR to Unicode, Semitic
    >>>> scholars reached the conclusion all Semitic languages share the same
    >>>> 22 characters. A long standing and quite useful conclusion that has
    >>>> nothing at all to do with your proposal.
    >>>
    >>>
    >>
    >>> But I dispute his last sentence. If the writing systems of these
    >>> languages share the same abstract characters, they form a single
    >>> script, which conflicts with the proposal to encode Phoenician as a
    >>> separate script.
    >
    <snip>
    >
    > So let's drop "script" for now. My basic contention is that each letter
    > of the Phoenician abjad is not a separate abstract character, but that
    > it and the corresponding square Hebrew letter are glyph variants of the
    > same abstract characters. And this is clearly the understanding of
    > Semitic scholars, as summarised by Patrick Durusau and quoted above. On
    > the other hand, nearly everyone agrees that there should be a mechanism
    > for distinguishing them in plain text.
    >

    The reason I pointed out that Semitic scholars had reached their view
    long prior to Unicode was to point out that they were not following the
    character/glyph model of the Unicode standard.

    In other words, if you ask a Semitic scholar a question about
    representation of Phoenician, you are most likely getting an answer
    based on a criteria other than the character/glyph model of the Unicode
    standard.

    That in no way makes the Semitic scholar's answer wrong, in fact is it
    right, for their domain. It has no relevance at all for a proposal to
    encode a script based on the Unicode character/glyph model.

    Hope you are having a great day!

    Patrick 

    -- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!

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