RE: Alphabet vs. script (was RE: Perception that Unicode is 16-bi t (w

From: jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com
Date: Mon Feb 26 2001 - 13:11:28 EST


A single alphabet of a single language is actually a pretty useless for
anything else than simple testing like "could this string of characters be a
native word in that language". As an example, 'c' is not part of the
Finnish language since no native Finnish word uses it, but as soon as one
starts to use loanwords, or people's names, one will need to use 'c'.
Neither are accented letters part of the Finnish alphabet (the umlauted a
and o that we have are not accents at all), but the same goes for them too:
if there's a name/loanword that has diacritics, we'll use them. So I'm all
for rather sticking with 'Latin script' which would contain all the Latin
letters, without and with diacritics.



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