Posted by: John Hudson
George, a single font could easily support both the Hebrew and Phoenican Unicode blocks for the same palaeo-Hebrew glyphs. Then the issue becomes not the encoding of the font but the encoding of the text: one might have identical looking text encoded in using two different sets of characters, both of them arguably legitimate depending on whether one is looking at this form of writing as ancient Hebrew or as ancient Canaanite.
The encoding of the Unicode Phoenician block became highly controversial. Some people thought it would be useful to be able to distinguish the encoding of early semitic writing from Hebrew at the plain text level; other people argued that although the letter forms differ the Hebrew square script was in fact the same writing system as the earlier form, and should be encoded the same way. Now we have the two Unicode blocks, and choices to make about how to use them. My concern now is that the encoding of semitic writing systems might be further fragmented, since 'Phoenician' is a narrow identity to apply to what I think should be a single early semitic script encoding.