From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Oct 01 2004 - 13:11:43 CST
At 10:22 -0800 2004-10-01, D. Starner wrote:
>Has anyone read "Absent Voices", by Rochell Altman? Taking her description
>of stoefwritung, it seems that Unicode needs a large block tenatively
>set aside for Anglo-Saxon writing, as every mark written was obviously
>phonetically distinct from any other, and size and vertical location
>were equally important.
Eh? What sort of notion is this?
>After all, it was a universal writing system
>clearly superior to the IPA. (For one thing, everyone can read Anglo-Saxon,
>but IPA takes learning.) Locally important in her off-handed dismissal
>of modern universal writing systems and universal languages, "In the
>computerized world of the late-twentieth century, the UNICODE Consortium
>was trying to create a 'universal' computer character set."
Oh, looky. Another one who thinks that the word is supposed to be
written in all caps.
>Another quote is "Learning to speak a foreign language was as simple
>as learning to read your native tongue with stoefwritung."
And what is it that "stoef" is supposed to mean? It's not in Clark
Hall & Merrit's dictionary, anyway.
>It amazes me that a book subtitled "The Story of Writing Systems in the
>West" spends so much time on Anglo-Saxon, and that a book that claims
>that a writing system is a universal system is about "the West", never
>going east of Babylon and rarely east of Calais.
You borrowed the book from a library? I hope so.
>For all my mocking, I must admit I've barely glanced through the book, and
>it looks like there might actually be a wealth of real information about
>Anglo-Saxon writing in there. I'm curious if anyone else has seen this book
>and has comments.
>--
I don't think I'd put this one into my wishlist, from your description.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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