Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > Michael Everson wrote:
> > >
> > > At 04:43 -0400 2003-09-15, Tex Texin wrote:
> > >
> > > >Now that is an interesting comment, and I probably should
> > know this, and a
> > > >quick look didn't turn up the answer: What is the criteria
> > by which Unicode
> > > >determines what is in or out of a script?
> > >
> > > Common sense?
> >
> > Doesn't look like common sense to me to say that Arabic is a subset of
> > Urdu.
>
> I saw no one saying this. Rather, in Unicodish, one would say that the "Urdu
> alphabet" is a subset of the "Arabic script".
>
> Note that "script" and "alphabet" are used here with a purely engineerish
> meaning:

Then perhaps the engineers ought to look at the real world sometime. You
could call the overall thing the "Islamic script," for instance.

> - The "Arabic script" is the subset the Unicode characters whose "Script"
> property (an informative property in the Unicode database) has the value
> "Arabic";
>
> - The "Urdu alphabet" is the minimum subset of "Arabic script" characters
> which would be included on a keyboard or in a font designed for the Urdu
> language.
>
> Both definitions are quite self-referential and technology-specific, and it
> would be an error to equate them with the same terms as used in linguistics
> or other fields.
>
> > Is Latin a subset of English?
>
> By the above definitions, it is the English alphabet which is a subset of
> the Latin script:

Nope; English has j, v, and w, Latin doesn't.

> - The "Latin script" is the subset the Unicode characters whose "Script"
> property has the value "Latin";

You could call the overall thing the "Roman script," for instance.

> - The "English alphabet" is the minimum subset of "Latin script" characters
> which would be included on a keyboard or in a font designed for the English
> language.
>
> > To write the word corvus, do you write Cee Oh Ar Vee You Ess? No, you
> > don't.
>
> How not? What would you reply if someone asks you: "How do you spell
> 'corvus'?

It's not English, it's Latin. Latin doesn't distinguish u and v, so you
would probably say Ca O Er U U Es.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...