Re: Fraktur Legibility (was Re: Response to Everson Phoenician)

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed May 26 2004 - 02:04:37 CDT

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    At 11:06 PM 5/25/2004, Doug Ewell wrote:
    >But then Dean responded:
    >
    > > So, you are saying there are glyph streams in German Fraktur that
    > > fluent, native Germans would have trouble reading.

    I consider myself moderately native, definitely of German origin, and
    arguably somewhat fluent in reading Fraktur...

    I can state that even after reading dozens of books I still need to
    take a closer look sometimes to see if I was reading a k, r or x,
    and that's for lower case. The uppercase letters, esp the ones that
    don't occur with really high frequencies, I can often only decode
    from context -- reading performance improving with length of exposure
    to a given text, as usual.

    Difficulties in reading a script may explain why it has been abandoned
    but they don't argue for or against encoding it. Otherwise, my handwriting,
    set to type would be a shoo-in. ;-)

    A./



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