From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat Dec 20 2003 - 16:14:37 EST
On 20/12/2003 11:50, Christopher John Fynn wrote:
>>For me two scripts that are different enough so that a text written
>>in one script will have imprecise matches in another, and will be
>>hardly recognizable by readers is a candidate to a separate encoding,
>>because it starts its own family of supplementary letters specific
>>to some families of languages needing these extensions.
>>
>>
>
>On this basis it could be argued that fraktur / black letter should be encoded
>separately from latin.
>
>- Chris
>
>
>
Indeed. Here are parts of my reply to Philippe on the Hebrew list:
> There are no distinctive features other than glyph shapes
> distinguishing Hebrew, Phoenician, Samaritan and "Early Aramaic" as
> proposed in http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n2042.pdf - apart
> from the pointing added later to Hebrew and Samaritan.
> [to the suggestion that "a text written in one script will have
> imprecise matches in another":] This does not apply to the Semitic
> scripts, which have a precise one to one mapping.
> If unrecognisably different glyph shapes alone are sufficient to
> justify encoding separate scripts, I will propose several new scripts
> e.g. black letter Latin, italic Cyrillic, cursive modern Hebrew,
> Nastaliq Arabic (actually the evidence on the bidi list today gives a
> much stronger case for this being encoded as a separate script), three
> separate Syriac styles, etc etc. And then there are scripts which have
> been rejected as ciphers, on the basis that they differ from existing
> scripts only in glyph shape.
(Although I did later say off list that these new script proposals were
not to be taken as a serious threat!)
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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