Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya dot org> wrote: > Well, because Latin was encoded first, Fraktur was not separately > encoded as derived from Latin. But if, by some historical accident, > Fraktur had been encoded first, would it have been necessary to encode > Latin separately, or could they have been unified?
As I've said before, I don't know enough about the historical relationship between Phoenician and Hebrew to get involved in this bloodbath. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how Fraktur keeps getting dragged into it. For heaven's sake, it's not THAT unrecognizably different from Antiqua. Since the gauntlet had been thrown down, I did go ahead and format some Vietnamese text samples in Fraktur or SÃtterlin, and showed the samples to a Vietnamese co-worker who moved to the U.S. sometime after high school. He had absolutely no problem reading the Fraktur, and said there are plenty of examples of Fraktur in Vietnam (mostly decorative, or in documents from the 1950s and earlier). He couldn't understand the SÃtterlin at all, but did recognize it as handwriting and not, say, a secret code or child's doodling. Admittedly, this is a person who is interested in linguistics and Unicode. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
