[Suppress-Script] Initial list of 300 languages

[John Cowan]

Ciar?n ? Duibh?n scripsit:

> But there are a couple of things to raise before I can be sure of that.  One
> is the phrase "writing tradition" used by John.  From other things he has
> said, I imagine he meant just "insular fonts" 

I was actually referring to handwriting (manuscript) tradition.  The
letter shapes are much older than the dots or the pre-reform spelling
conventions; indeed, these shapes were used for Old English, which has
no dots, and would probably appear in Welsh manuscripts of comparable
age if we had any.

> Another thing is the library example.  There are indeed many books in Irish
> which exist in "old" and "new" editions, corresponding to these two main
> writing traditions.  It's a difference that might be worth tagging, but as
> the difference in shapes is only one of the differences between them, and
> arguably the least important one, using a "script" tag to distinguish them
> is not appropriate.

Nevertheless, it is the one which ISO 15924 is meant to encode.

> With this interpretation of Latg, my feeling on the question of the default
> script for ga, sga, and mga is that all should default to Latn if the
> charset is ISO 8859 but not 8859-14.  For unicode, it should be Latn if the
> text contains no dotted-consonant characters.  For ISO 8859-14, and for
> unicode using dotted-consonant characters, most people would probably prefer
> Latg (though I wouldn't, at least for ga).  If such conditionality is not
> possible, a universal default of Latn may be acceptable.

It isn't possible: there can be only one default script per language.

-- 
In politics, obedience and support      John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org>
are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan