[Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]

[John Cowan]

Michael Everson scripsit:

> There are mappings between T and S characters. The two orthographies 
> don't *alternate* in the same way Fraktur and Roman might, but that 
> doesn't make them different scripts.

But not algorithmic ones.  Many S characters map to a single T, and
unless I misremember, there are even S characters
whose T equivalents are themselves S characters in a different sense,
with their own T equivalents!

> >But the *result* of that revolution has been a bifurcation of the script's
> >users into those who can read only SC and those who can read only TC.
> 
> Lots of readers of the Latin script can't identify thorn or gha or 
> ezh, or read IPA.

IPA is not the orthography of any language, by its nature.  As for not
knowing thorn, you might have a case if there were a group of people who
wrote English with thorn.

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan at ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_