Why not? [Re: [Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]

[John Clews]

In message <p05200a06babb085bdda3@[195.218.107.154]> Michael Everson writes:
> At 07:23 -0400 2003-04-10, John Cowan wrote:
> >Michael Everson scripsit:
> >
> >>  IPA is a special use of Latin, but it's still Latin.
> >
> >Perhaps what is needed is a notion of "script subsets", which would
> >include Hans, Hant, and Ipal.  In this way we could clearly discriminate
> >between, say, English in ordinary orthography (en) and in IPA transcription
> >(en-ipal).
> 
> But why?

But why not? Surely it is useful to make such distinctions sometimes,
especially the example given of Ipal.

Some users would want materials that were

        en YES, -Ipal NO

especially if they wanted to exclude linguistic studies in a
particular domain.

Other users might want to separate out, and to concentrate on, texts
which were

        en NO,  -Ipal YES

particularly if they were doing a study of phonetic usage, or even of
application of IPA.

Otherwise, if we don't need such distinctions, why do we need
ISO 15924 (Codes for representation of names of scripts) at all?

Again, not a rhetorical question: I'd be interested to hear of any
good reasons why we don't need such distinctions.

Best regards

John Clews

--
John Clews,
Keytempo Limited (Information Management),
8 Avenue Rd, Harrogate, HG2 7PG
Tel:    +44 1423 888 432
mobile: +44 7766 711 395
Email:  Scripts2 at sesame.demon.co.uk
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Committee Member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC22/WG20: Internationalization;
Committee Member of ISO/TC37/SC2/WG1: Language Codes