[Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]

[Michael Everson]

At 21:34 -0400 2003-04-09, John Cowan wrote:
>Michael Everson scripsit:
>
>  > There are mappings between T and S characters. The two orthographies
>  > don't *alternate* in the same way Fraktur and Roman might, but that
>  > doesn't make them different scripts.
>
>But not algorithmic ones.

So what? So it's messy. So what?

>  > >But the *result* of that revolution has been a bifurcation of the script's
>>  >users into those who can read only SC and those who can read only TC.
>>
>>  Lots of readers of the Latin script can't identify thorn or gha or
>>  ezh, or read IPA.
>
>IPA is not the orthography of any language, by its nature.

A number of languages have orthographies which are hardly 
distinguishable from the IPA transcription, and which were based on, 
possibly with simplifications, of the IPA transcriptions.

>As for not knowing thorn, you might have a case if there were a 
>group of people who wrote English with thorn.

Fine. Plenty of Russians have no idea what non-Russian Cyrillic 
letters are, or are for.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com