Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

On 19/07/2003 19:26, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Peter: 
>
> I recognize that what I'm suggesting here has a limited use, namely for 
> inscriptions, ostraca and a reconstruction of how Tenakh would have been written 
> before the adoption of the Aramaic square characters. I have no intention of 
> replacing the Masoritic text with all its points and cantilation marks. I claim that 
> there is room for both. 
>
> If all one wants to do is to display the paleo-Hebrew text to the screen and printer, 
> then one can do as what previous posts mentioned even as I have already done, 
> namely give glyphs only to the displayed characters, the sofits having the same 
> glyphs as the non-sofits and don't worry about the underlying encoding. But there 
> is also reason to encode the text cleanly in paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician. Let's not 
> limit ourselves to one or the other. 
>
> Karl W. Randolph. 
>
>  
Karl, there was recently discussion of just this on the Unicode list. It 
was argued that Phoenician (including proto-Hebrew) was sufficiently 
different from later "square" Hebrew to merit being encoded as a 
different script. I accepted this argument for Phoenician, but rejected 
the same argument for Aramaic on the basis that the sample glyphs for 
Palmyrene Aramaic were similar enough to "square" Hebrew to be 
considered the same alphabet.

--
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/