From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Wed Nov 12 2003 - 20:21:16 EST
Jim Allan <jallan@smrtytrek.com> writes:
> We have two scripts in which the forms of the characters are not at all
> those of the Latin script.
>
> However for both every character can be matched with a corresponding
> character in the Latin script.
>
> So why would one be called a cipher and one not?
More then just two scripts; I'd be surprised if any alphabetic script in
Unicode couldn't be matched with the Latin script, and given transliteration,
probably has. Cherokee, as normally (non-scholarly) written in Latin,
is (arguably) a cipher of the Cherokee script--or vice versa. But Theban and
Barcodes are conceptually Latin; when using them, people are thinking in terms
of normal English orthography, and when thinking out loud, people use the names
of the normal English letters. If Doug Ewell uses the names of the IPA characters
when speaking out loud, then you have a better case. But otherwise, they aren't
conceptually IPA characters.
Another distinction is that there is a one-to-one mapping from the (monocase)
English alphabet to Theban. But there's no one-to-one mapping from any normal
subset of IPA to Ewellic; Ewellic will not serve as a replacement for IPA.
-- __________________________________________________________ Sign-up for your own personalized E-mail at Mail.com http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup Search Smarter - get the new eXact Search Bar for free! http://www.exactsearchbar.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Nov 12 2003 - 20:59:51 EST