From: Karljürgen Feuerherm (cuneiform@rogers.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 11:30:49 EDT
Michael Everson responded:
> At 08:42 -0400 2003-07-15, Karljürgen Feuerherm wrote:
> > Michael Everson said:
> > > My native script isn't Hebrew but I am certain that no one who was
could
> > > easily read a newspaper article written in Phoenician or Samaritan
letters.
> >
> >Surely that is not an argument for encoding a separate script, is it?
>
> It is sometimes. :-)
>
> >Most German people I know can't read the German
> >cursive script used say 50 years ago. But the
> >characters clearly correspond to the Latin
> >characters in use today.
>
> The handwriting is difficult to read. One would
> think that in German schools it would be at least
> introduced so children would know about it.
One might hope so, but when I was at school there (1972-5), would you
believe I was only one of two in my class (and a non-native speaker) who
could read Fraktur? And so far as I know, I was the only one who could
recognize much of cursive, let alone read it fluently....
(That is of course only one place, but as it was a classical school I doubt
it was different in most places, or has 'improved' [bias acknowledged]
since.)
K
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