From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed May 26 2004 - 16:17:59 CDT
On 26/05/2004 13:13, Peter Constable wrote:
> ...
>
>
>So, the question is whether contemporaneous use within a single
>community suggests that they were viewed as the same or distinct. Either
>is possible. If they were considered "font" variants, then you might
>expect to see different documents using one or the other, or see
>different elements within a single document using one or the other. But
>if you see documents containing equivalent content repeated in each,
>then that might well suggest they were viewed as distinct.
>
>
>
>
My experience of living for seven years in a country undergoing a
gradual script transition might be relevant here. In Azerbaijan the
official script was changed from Cyrillic to Latin in 1991. But, before
stricter laws were introduced around 2001 that all publications must be
in Latin script, the majority of publications were in Cyrillic, except
for those targetted at children who were learning Latin script at
school. It was also common at one time to see newspapers with headlines
in Latin and text in Cyrillic, and books with titles in Latin and text
in Cyrillic. This was done because the publishers wanted to appear to
support Latin script but also knew that most of their target audience
was more comfortable reading Cyrillic. Some documents were published
separately in both scripts, presumably so that they could be easily
accessible to both adults and children.
Not much here which could not have taken place in Germany after the
official abolition of Fraktur. Sorry, we are supposed to have moved away
from that argument.
It is hard to say whether the two scripts were and are considered glyph
variants or separate scripts. Probably more the latter (which is of
course the Unicode view). But it was well recognised that the two
scripts could be mapped on to one another one to one. And this was made
use of in a number of legacy fonts using different encodings, Latin at
Cyrillic code points and vice versa. It is also recognised that for
several letters, at least as capitals, there is no distinction between
the two forms. Indeed I have even seen a written word YEMƏKXAHA "cafe,
canteen" which shifts from Cyrillic to Latin script in the middle of the
word; all of the glyphs in this word are valid in both Latin and
Cyrillic, but Y and H have different meanings in the two scripts, and in
this word Y must be Latin and H must be Cyrillic.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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