From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 16 2009 - 01:43:18 CDT
Michael Everson
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/14/aramaic-revival-syria
>
> Good thing we encoded Imperial Aramaic... :-)
Well, it does not seem to exist any relation within this rticle with the
Imperial Aramaic script; it speaks about the Aramaic language instead (and
its two variants found in 3 villages of Syria), but not much about how it is
written. It also speaks bout the fact that some people spoke the language
without knowing how to write it (so they may write it using the Arabic
script they know and teach to their children, along with the Arabic language
itself), and the fact that it was even forbidden to speak it in the past.
The mission of the created institute is not decribed enough to indicate if
the language now taught there will effectively use an "Aramaic" script
(which one ?) when it is still considered there as some form of the Hebrew
script, and the danger of exposing these areas to Israel revendications
about Hebrew settlements. The photo illustrating the article is not really
decisive, as it is a stone in a museum, and even looks like the usual Hebrew
script in its square form.
I've seen nothing there related to the Imperial Aramaic script in Unicode,
or the Unicode constribution to save the endangered language or help writing
it. Are you speaking about some extensions (or conventions of usage, on top
of the orthographic conventions) for the basic Hebrew, or Syriac, or Arabic
scripts (or even the Greek script) as they are encoded in Unicode to support
this language?
Does it help to give access to numerized ressources on computers in that
Syrian intitute, rather than on old, rare, fragile and expensive books? How
does this help the remaining people speaking the language but don't know how
to write it?
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