From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 07:18:07 EST
On 10/11/2003 01:51, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 17:47 -0800 2003-11-09, Curtis Clark wrote:
>
>> What determines whether a script is a cipher of another?
>
>
> Whim?
>
> Theban was rejected because Books of Shadows are usually handwritten
> and private and there is no requirement to exchange data. As a cipher,
> it is easy to determine when Latin orthography is written one-to-one,
> with silent gh's and so on in English.
This last point may not be a sufficient criterion for distinguishing a
cipher from a different orthography. When the Azerbaijani alphabet was
changed from Cyrillic to Latin in 1992, the Cyrillic letters were
replaced one to one by Latin letters (based on Turkish but with some
necessary extra letters). No attempt was made to regularise the
orthography e.g. to replace Q by Ğ when in fact pronounced as a
fricative. Does this make the Latin script a cipher for the Cyrillic,
and justify the confusion caused there by the continuing use of a
variety of incompatible transliterating fonts?
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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