From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Dec 26 2003 - 15:27:57 EST
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.
>So in the case of the ancient Semitic scripts - even if they are closely
>related, is each associated with a particular written language - or were the
>different but related scripts being used to write a common language?
All of them can be used to write more than one language. Some of them
may not have been. It's complex and needs review.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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