Phonetic orthographies

[David Starner]

On 11/25/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at wiktionaryz.org> wrote:
> John Cowan schreef:
> > That's a very artificial distinction.  When Russian removed some
> > letters and added another, was that a change in script?  Clearly not.
> >
> Well, this is why this may be an education to me, but to me it would be
> a change in the script first and in the orthography second.

Then virtually no two languages have the same script, and most
languages have had several scripts. It's clear that that was not a
change in script as the word is used in Unicode and ISO 15924, because
both of them encoded Cyrillic, not Russian (early), Russian (old),
Bulgarian (Soviet), Bulgarian, etc.

> When people discuss Hant and Hans, they are NOT talking about an
> orthography of one language. Chinese is not a language, it is a written
> system that is shared by people speaking many languages.

By and large, when most people discuss Chinese, it is a language. The
Chinese Wikipedia is a success and could only be a success because the
contributors use a common language. Hant versus Hans doesn't apply to
Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese Cho Nom.