Marco Cimarosti wrote: > - "Script" is a generic term meaning a writing system of any kind, its > inventory of signs and its orthographic rules. > > - "Alphabet" is a specific class of scripts, whose principal characteristic > is that tends to map each sign to one of the language's phonemes. I think that should rather be called an "alphabetic script", e.g. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic. "Alphabet" rather means the repertoire associated with a specific language which uses an alphabetic script. Thus Italian and English share the Latin script, but the English alphabet is a superset of the Italian alphabet. I say "associated with" because particular graphemes may be used with the language (e.g. accented vowels in Italian or French) and yet be excluded from the alphabet by being consolidated with other alphabetic letters. There is also a distressing and non-English tendency to use "alphabet" as a synonym for "alphabetic letter" (e.g. "English uses 26 alphabets") which I have seen on this mailing list and elsewhere. This is a barbarism. -- There is / one art || John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Joel Rees
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Peter_Constable
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Ayers, Mike
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... John Cowan
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Tex Texin
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Ayers, Mike
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Kenneth Whistler
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Joel Rees
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Marco Cimarosti
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Peter_Constable
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... John Cowan
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Michael Everson
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Marco Cimarosti
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Michael Everson
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... DougEwell2
- RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Peter_Constable
- Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate... Kenneth Whistler