Doug Ewell a écrit :
And thus he cannot read a Vietnamese text in Sütterlin, as you said, because it is not a stylistic variant of Latin ?It's clear to me that the reason my colleague and I can read this font is not that we have any special knowledge of "both scripts," but because it's a stylistic variant of Latin.
Aren't we forgetting something here?
The users of Sütterlin, when they were still alive, would read Fraktur in their books and Newspapers, type roman style on their typewriters and use Sütterlin in manual correspondence. To them, the choice of writing style depended not on the content, but on the mode of transmission.
That, to me, provides the best argument in support of the unification of these writing styles into a single script, relegating the differences to rich text.
This is so, even though it is not possible to turn a German text into Fraktur by simply changing the font style. Proper Fraktur has required use of certain ligatures and long s, both of which cannot be applied mechanically. Proper Fraktur style would also require the retention of certain foreign words and phrases in roman style. Again, that process requires authorial discretion.
Fortunately, a transformation in the opposite direction, from Fraktur to Roman is straightforward, simply discarding the extra information.
A./
PS: some mathematical notation uses Sütterlin distinctively. However, in all cases I'm familiar with, Sütterlin letters can be substituted by Fraktur, serving merely as their handwritten equivalent. Fraktur symbols for mathematical use have of course been provided in Unicode.
