From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri May 07 2004 - 13:02:06 CDT
At 04:36 AM 5/7/2004, Patrick Andries wrote:
>Doug Ewell a écrit :
>
>>It's clear to me that the reason my colleague and I can read this font
>>is not that we have any special knowledge of "both scripts," but because
>>it's a stylistic variant of Latin.
>>
>And thus he cannot read a Vietnamese text in Sütterlin, as you said,
>because it is not a stylistic variant of Latin ?
Aren't we forgetting something here?
The users of Sütterlin, when they were still alive, would read Fraktur in
their books and Newspapers, type roman style on their typewriters and use
Sütterlin in manual correspondence. To them, the choice of writing style
depended not on the content, but on the mode of transmission.
That, to me, provides the best argument in support of the unification of
these writing styles into a single script, relegating the differences to
rich text.
This is so, even though it is not possible to turn a German text into
Fraktur by simply changing the font style. Proper Fraktur has required use
of certain ligatures and long s, both of which cannot be applied
mechanically. Proper Fraktur style would also require the retention of
certain foreign words and phrases in roman style. Again, that process
requires authorial discretion.
Fortunately, a transformation in the opposite direction, from Fraktur to
Roman is straightforward, simply discarding the extra information.
A./
PS: some mathematical notation uses Sütterlin distinctively. However, in
all cases I'm familiar with, Sütterlin letters can be substituted by
Fraktur, serving merely as their handwritten equivalent. Fraktur symbols
for mathematical use have of course been provided in Unicode.
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