On 10/11/2003 03:38, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At this point, I'm a bit puzzled about the circumstances in which an
alphabet is a cipher of another, and when it isn't. In an offlist
conversation, you, I, and others seemed to arrive at the consensus that
the Theban "magickal script" was a cipher of Latin. And many years ago,
you raised the question of whether Etruscan was a ciper of either Latin
or Greek (as we both know now, it isn't). I assumed that the criteria
were (1) the scripts can be used interchangeably to write a single
language, and (2) there is a one-to-one correspondence between their glyphs.
That can be easily disproven as a definition of a cipher by creating a cipher
which doesn't match those two criteria.
And by pointing to an example where these criteria are met but one
script is not a cipher of the other. See the example of Azerbaijani
which I just posted. The same may well be true of many languages written
in Hebrew script only by Jewish sub-communities, unless these are to be
treated as ciphers.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
