From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 12:56:43 CDT
From: <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> What I think is that it's okay to unify Fraktur into Latin, despite
> the lack of Fraktur glyphs for lots of things. Icelandic, still less
> Vietnamese, in Fraktur would be a perversity; similarly, pointed
> Hebrew (which I point out is a small fraction of all the Hebrew
> in the world, most of which is written using the 22CWSA in Square form)
> would be a perversity in any font but a Square one.
Perversity also exists in the Latin script; for example when ISO or some
academic sources are stating that toponyms or transliterated scripts be written
into French using diacritics that are absent from French.
Yes there are sources that state that we should transliterate some Hindi names
into French using Devanagari diacritics, that nobody except a native Hindi
writer can read and write correctly...
Same thing with hacek, or rings above letters. For example, see the normative
French orthograph of "Åland" in ISO 3166-1: how is a French reader supposed to
write or pronounce it? Most French readers/writers will simply ignore this
unknown ring diacritic and will simply write "Aland", instead of "Aaland" (or
"Âland" with a circumflex? or "Äland" with a diaeresis?) which would have been
more correct for French (some French writer will wonder if this ring should not
instead alter the following consonnant will want to write "Alland" instead....).
Trying to borrow foreign diacritics into another alphabet not designed for the
representation of that language will most often lead to confusion, and lots of
orthographic variants. Transliteration rules should normally be used according
of the target language, not just with its script.
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