On 28/12/2003 20:47, D. Starner wrote:
...
Intra-script, a difference in appearance has call for seperate codings.
Inter-script, if the appearance is dissimilar enough to be a bar to
reading, and there's a disjoint population of users (so that one is
not a handwriting or cipher variant of another), there is reason to
encode a seperate script.
Well, there is not a disjoint population of serious users of Phoenician
and Hebrew today, in that anyone who wants to read Phoenician
inscriptions is almost certainly already familiar with Hebrew (a very
closely related language) in Hebrew script. The only other user
community that I know of for Phoenician is those who are interested in
the development of alphabets and glyph shapes. But only images, or just
possibly a wide range of fonts, can provide the script style
distinctions which such people require.
Emerson's division
would suggest four different scripts ought to be used for coding the
same texts with the same logical characters with the same names,
Yes. Look at Serbo-Croat; there are the same texts with the same
logical characters, one in Latin and one in Cyrillic. I'd be
surprised to find that the only case; I would assume some of the
Turkic languages that switched from Cyrillic to Latin did so by
changing glyphs instead of any deeper script features.
Yes, this is true at least of Azerbaijani, which mapped Cyrillic glyphs
to Latin ones one-to-one. But with Serbo-Croat we are talking of two
separate communities which prefer to use separate scripts for what is
essentially the same language; and with Azerbaijani we are talking of a
deliberate decision by a people, or at least its government, to change
scripts.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
