At 15:02 +0100 11/11/01, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

>I know that the Latin alphabet descends from the Greek one, but that
>doesn't make them one script.

Latin was derived from Etruscan, not Greek.

You and Peter are talking on two entirely different levels of
abstraction, and it is getting tiresome because no one is getting
anywhere!

>Well, to me those are completely different things. Are there any
>classifications of scripts that are not historically based, but only
>based on the properties of the scripts?

What good would that be? I'm siding with Peter on this. The taxonomy
is useful because it helps us understand how writing arose, how it
changed, and how people using various scripts comprehend the segments
and other things.

This is linguistic and it is interesting.

An historical classification helps us understand the relation between
scripts, which helps us understand the history of the spread of
writing, influence from neighbouring writing systems, and other
things. Calligraphy, palaeography ductus, and all sorts of other
things are brought to bear here, and it helps us design new fonts and
so on.

This is historical and it is interesting.

What would a classification based on "script properties" entail, and
why would it be interesting?
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