Unicode Mail List Archive: Re: ISO 15924: Different Arabic scripts? (original) (raw)

Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: ISO 15924: Different Arabic scripts?"

On 11/18/2005 9:26 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote:

> From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
>
>> This wasn't Michael's question. He asked whether Naskh and Nastaliq
>> were distinguished by having different *orthographies* -- that is,
>> whether certain words are actually spelled differently when written
>> in these Arabic-script variants, not merely whether the letterforms
>> look different.
>
>
> There are orthographic differences between German written in Fraktur
> (uses e and no umlaut),

This is flatly incorrect. I wish you would try to limit your comments to
areas for which you actually have expertise. Some Fraktur fonts may use
a superscripted 'e', but 'no umlaut' is patently false.

> and German in modern Latin (uses umlaut, or e sometimes in ASCII texts).

this is as irrelevant in this context as the similar use of 'e' for
telegrams.

> Also the use of long s in Fraktur is frequent and it forms many more
> ligatures.

if by 'it' you mean Fraktur, that would be true, but you wrote it as if
you meant it only for the long s. Also, it's not whether ligatures are
formed, but whether they are mandatory or obligatory. Some of the
ligatures involving esp. 'c' in Fraktur are essentially obligatory in
certain words (prohibited in others) in 'proper' traditional Fraktur
typography.

Many more works are Roman only compared to Fraktur only, because certain
words and phrases (mostly foreign) were spelled in Roman - that is, the
Fraktur typography maintained a typographic distinction between foreign
and native words that's more similar to the Japanese use of Katakana in
its universality and consistency, than to the (less consistent) use of
italics for foreign words in modern English publications.

There are even examples of mixed-Roman/Fraktur words.

A./

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