Mike Ayers wrote:
> 1. When told that I was using a writing system that
> was named the same as another language, I was not
> inordinately confused. A better example would be the
> Latin alphabet used for many European languages (yes,
> Latin's a dead language, but a language nonetheless).
In a sense, Latin is not "dead": it has evolved into the Romance languages
still spoken today.
In fact, the term "Latin" is also used as an ethnical term for speakers of
Romance languages (specially Italian and Iberian languages, less so for
French), hence expressions as "Latin America" (= where Spanish and
Portuguese are spoken) or "Latin Quarter" (= the area of Paris where Italian
was spoken?).
So the term is more or less as ethnically marked as "Han" or "Chinese" but,
in spite of this, it is apparently not felt as offensive or inappropriate to
denote the alphabet used by, e.g., English or German speakers.
I wonder what non-Arabs users of the Arabic script call it. Perhaps Roozbeh
Pournander and N.R. Liwal can help us: how is the "Arabic alphabet" called
in Farsi, Urdu, and Pashtun?
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:18 EDT