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Hi.<BR>Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org <BR>Fri Dec 24 07:03:10 CET 2010 <BR> <BR>> CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:<BR>>> And both [ar] (the macro-language) and [arb] (standard Arabic) should <BR>>> get a suppres-script [arab], as should in my opinion Egyptian Arabic, <BR>>> Moroccan Arabic, and North Levantine Arabic (however not being a <BR>>> native speaker and having studied primarily the Standard with a bit of <BR>>> Levantine Arabic I don't feel my opinion is definitive).But I am not <BR>>> sure what script is most used online to write dialects which are not <BR>>> traditionally written at all -- for which the most common uses would <BR>>> be blogs, text, email, etc, also some Bible translations (which online <BR>>> seem to be overwhelmingly in Latin script I think for convenience). <BR>>> These may be overwhelmingly written in Arabic script but it's also <BR>>> possible that a mix of scripts is used.<BR>> I'm sure nobody here disagrees about Standard Arabic itself, nor about <BR>> many of the other well-known Arabics.<BR>> I thought this thread started with the premise that the Suppress-Script <BR>> status of a macrolanguage and that of each of its encompassed languages <BR>> were interdependent -- that a macrolanguage should not have S-S unless <BR>> *all* of its encompassed languages share the same S-S.<BR>> That troubles me when we have a concept like "Arabic," with well over <BR>> 200 million speakers of all varieties of Arabic combined, where almost <BR>> anyone familiar with Arabic would say that the writing system <BR>> "overwhelmingly" used by the literate members of that group is the <BR>> Arabic writing system -- and then we have concepts like Judeo-Yemeni <BR>> Arabic, with 50,000 speakers, written in Hebrew, <BR>
(Oops -- my goof; this particular variety is not encompassed under [ar] -- although Judeo-Arabic varieties do borrow from/share some similarities with other Arabic dialects.)<BR>
> or Cypriot Spoken <BR>> Arabic, with 1,300 speakers, written in we-don't-know-what, and we are <BR>> prepared to say that because these encompassed languages don't qualify <BR>> for an S-S of 'Arab', neither does the macrolanguage 'ar'. That doesn't <BR>> seem right. I don't know how many exceptions like these exist, but a <BR>> few hundred thousand out of 200 million still leaves an overwhelming <BR>> majority in its wake.<BR>Thanks Doug for this nice explanation. Yes interdependence of the language varieties and the macro-languages was the premise of this thread -- perhaps I did get carried away; I wanted to indicate which varieties I thought were were overwhelmingly written in one script and thus candidates for suppress-script (the varieties, not the macro-languages). I tend to agree that making the macro-languages and individual languages subsumed under these macrol-languages completely interdependent in terms of suppress-script is troubling -- if that is what you mean. Yes, [ar] is often considered to be equivalent to [arb] for legacy applications (see <A href="http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-choosing-language-tags">http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-choosing-language-tags</A>) and thus if [arb] has a suppress-script of [arab] then I personally would expect [ar] to also get a suppress-script of [arab] -- regardless of whether the remaining languages under [ar] get a suppress-script -- but I have some questions about a suppress-script for languages varieties that are not normally written and that can be represented with other alphabets. (Hope this makes sense.)<BR> <BR>Best (and best wishes for the winter Holidays),<BR> <BR>--C. E. Whitehead<BR><A href="mailto:cewcathar@hotmail.com">cewcathar@hotmail.com</A> <BR> </body>
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