[Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]

[John Cowan]

Jon Hanna scripsit:

> Just about every language gets encoded in Latin, since just about every
> language has come into contact with a culture with the Latin alphabet and
> big guns. Limitations based on "in practice and by their users" are going to
> be a bone of contention. I agree it is by far the most important case, but I
> foresee problems if we define our goals to tightly to that.

Make easy things easy and hard things possible.  Transliteration is a
second-order concern.

> Even Finnegan's Wake? Okay, unfair example.

Y'know, I thought of bringing that up, and decided it would be too pedantic.
:-)  But the Wake has been no stranger to me since my youth.  My father,
as it happens, used to relax in the evening by working his way through it.

> Still, the strongest differences between the two are present in both written
> and spoken language I feel, 

But they don't block mutual intelligibility.

-- 
Real FORTRAN programmers can program FORTRAN    John Cowan
in any language.  --Allen Brown                 jcowan at reutershealth.com