Got it! Thanks.
Hamid's suggestion about searching Character Viewer for 'Syriac' indeed turfed up Syriac glyphs--and an indication that East Syriac font Adiabene was installed. I did try to install it, but Font Book only displayed a Courier face for it, so I removed it, at least from Font Book's ken. (I'm still using Mavericks because Yosemite seems to offer nothing useful and half the reviewers give it one star. Anybody have a recommendation here?)
The Beth Mardutho page recommended by Erik can't find any of its Syriac stuff today. They did say something last week about updating their Mac installation guide Real Soon Now.
One minor question. Adiabene calls lam 'lamedh', and offers an ayn-shaped glyph which it calls 'e'. Is this just dialect? or are e and ayn different characters? e has an extra wiggle in its base line compared to a Syriac keyboard which would display but not install, on which ayn was flat-bottomed.
I am increasingly impressed by the ability to read these cursive consonant-depleted vowel-omitting scripts with multiple forms per letter. Granted, English is vastly unphonetic, and has issues with phonemes that lack single-letter glyphs, but to formalize an alphabet with multiple consonants per glyph seems to require a strange attitude toward language!
And after all that, I ended up using ܠ and ܥ, justto keep my HTML legal. (These have the added advantage of not triggering automatic RTL writing direction.) Anyhow, thanks again.
Cheers, Ferren
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(Dr) Ferren MacIntyre
1 ch. des Echarts
Campagne sur Aude
11260 France
+33 (0) 468 748870
(GMT+1), although I'm only 2° off the Greenwich meridian, this is France we're talking about.
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