At 04:17 PM 12/12/2003, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > and it isn't unusual for a language to be written with a subset (just as
> > English is written with the subset of the Latin script).
>
>No, it's written with the English alphabet.

Which is a subset of a set of signs that is also the source of a different
but partially overlapping subset that constitutes, e.g., the Wolof
alphabet. You may not have any need to identify that superset, but other
people do and they are commonly using the term script for this purpose.

>Why would I use a term for something that doesn't need to be referred
>to?

No one is asking you to use the term script -- or any other term -- for
this purpose. No one is trying to impose this terminology on writing
theoreticians. All that I'm suggesting is that you understand how and why
this term is used in this way by people who have found a need to refer to
supersets that may be the source of signs used in multiple writing systems.
If, for example, one is assigning an identifier, e.g. a 16-bit character
code, to the English letter A, it is necessary to be able to say in a
definitive way whether the French letter A or the Russian letter A should
have the same identifier, i.e. to say whether these letters belong to the
same superset or different ones. Whether the distinction thus made
corresponds to theories about writing systems is neither here nor there:
the distinction could be completely arbitrary (although I don't think it is
since the historical origins and divergence of the Latin and Cyrillic
scripts are well documented), and it would still be *useful*. Maybe not
useful to Peter Daniels, but useful to a lot of other people who have
different needs.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@...

What was venerated as style was nothing more than
an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
- Orhan Pamuk, _My name is red_