Re: New contribution

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu May 06 2004 - 01:11:17 CDT


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 Sütterlin, 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
Sütterlin 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/



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