There is also a functional/semantic reason why /Fraktur/ — or rather
/gebrochene Schrift/ in general — and what you call “modern Latin” must
be considered different scripts: once it was customary in Germany to use
/gebrochene Schrift/ for anything German and /Antiqua/ for foreign
borrowings. And this meant that two persons called Anne, one from Paris
and the other one from Berlin, were distinguishable by choice of script
alone.
Charlie
On 11 September 2013 Otto Stolz wrote:
Hello,
am 2013-09-10 um 22:43 Uhr hat Gerrit Ansmann geschrieben:
In contrast to Greek and Coptic (as far as I
understand them), changing a modern text to fraktur is only a change of
the font
This is not so.
Fraktur text is subject to orthographic rules different
from those applying to text in modern Latin.
E. g., in German fraktur text, there are specific rules
for differentiating Long S »ſ« from Round S »s«, while
in modern Latin text only the Round S has been used for
decades (the latest Long S in modern Latin German printed
text I have seen is from the 1950s, when it was already
rather unusual; the official German spelling rules from
1996 do not mention the Long S any more). Hence, a modern
Germn text, when simply transliterated into fraktur, will
not be orthographically correct.
The various abbreviations used in older fraktur text,
but not in modern Latin script, have already been mentioned
by other contributions to this thread.
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
