Re: Thai v. Lao (was: Lao Letter Fo Sung and Lao Letter Fo Tam)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Oct 21 2005 - 13:14:22 CST

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    From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
    > Philippe Verdy wrote:
    >
    >> it is now very reasonnable to keep them encoded separately, as these
    >> scripts have their own separate history of use, and their own semantics.
    >
    > How should one go about disunifying the English from the French and German
    > scripts? Their writing systems have comparable or longer separate
    > histories.

    No. Their writing system is common, as the script was used by the same
    people often sharing the same language: Latin. Litteracy in French or German
    or English is recent in the history, but the history of the Latin script
    (that they borrowed and used almost consistently with Latin rules as a
    common denominator) is much longer. There's a single script for all these
    languages, and that's why it is easy to read all of them (I don't say
    understand them or knowing how to write the spoken language) when you have
    been tought the Latin alphabet in either languages (this can't be said for
    the Greek and Cyrillic scripts that do require extra course to recognize the
    extra letters, and avoid confusions for example between P and R or B and V).
    In addition, these languages often borrow words from each other, without
    changing much of their orthography (sometimes without even altering it).

    You are mixing the effective separation of the languages with your false
    separation of the Latin script they have shared... Remember that Unicode
    does not encode languages, but scripts.



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