From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Sat Dec 27 2003 - 17:55:10 EST
On 12/26/03 15:27, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 17:46 +0000 2003-12-26, Christopher John Fynn wrote:
>
>> (Though the Roman style & Fraktur style of Latin script are probably
>> more
>> different from each other as some of the separately encoded Indic
>> scripts [e.g. Kannada / Telugu])
>
>
> Sorry, Chris, this is unsubstantiated speculation, and it doesn't
> happen to be true.
>
> In 1997, I showed some comparisons between Coptic, Greek, Cyrillic,
> and Gothic showing that all of them but Greek were similar enough to
> be read with a minimum of training and practice. I revised this a bit
> in 2001: http://www.evertype.com/standards/cy/coptic.html. German,
> English, and Irish can all be read with similarly low learning curve
> whether the script is Fraktur or Gaelic; the number of letterforms
> which differ is small. Wedding invitations in English-speaking
> countries are routinely written in non-Latin garb. the identification
> is uncontested! No student of writing systems classes the "Gaelic
> script" as something different from "Latin script". The same cannot be
> said of Phoenician, Samaritan, and Hebrew, for instance.
FWIW, nobody needed to teach me to read Fraktur or Gaelic. I could make
sense of them pretty much on my own, and after working out the oddities
could/can read them with fair facility and speed. I was looking at some
Samaritan samples that someone sent me over the weekend, and although I
can read Hebrew, reading the Samaritan was extremely tough going. I had
to look up letter-shapes in the tables several times, and even when I
had some of them learned, it was still very much sounding out the words,
or thinking letter-letter-letter and putting together the more familiar
letters in my head to get a word. The language itself wasn't that
unfamiliar; much of it was Biblical quotes, some of which I knew by
heart; other text was fairly normal Hebrew and Aramaic.
In fairness, kids in school are taught specially to read Rashi script,
though it's not such a chore. Only a few of the letters are really
drastically different from what they're used to, and my son says he
could read it before the class had really gone through the stuff from
his Rashi book.
~mark
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