Mixing scripts (Re: Unicode versions (Re: Criteriaforexceptional characters))

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Mon Dec 25 09:07:45 CET 2006



--On Monday, 25 December, 2006 14:34 +0900 Martin Duerst
<duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:

> At 23:07 06/12/24, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
>> As I trust everyone knows, there are controversies in the
>> anthropological linguistics community about how many writing
>> systems there are whose origins are completely independent,
>> but the number is not large -- some scholars would claim as
>> few as two or three.  We also know that writing systems
>> evolve, adapt, and absorb characters from geographically or
>> culturally close other ones.  To use Martin's example, it is
>> not an accident that the Roman-derived character "W" is
>> called double-u.  It not a character that Virgil or Cicero
>> ever saw, even though its usual glyph is more commonly
>> constructed to resemble a "VV" ligature than a "UU" one
>> (e.g., characters with curvy parts are rather hard to chisel
>> into stone).
> 
> Well, I don't think we can say that the old Romans never saw
> a "U" or a "V", but for them it was one and the same character.
> Wikipedia
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_alphabet)
> says that the separation only became standard in the 18th
> century.

I know... sorry if I was not clear.  What I meant was that they
never saw "W" as a separate character.

   john







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