--- In qalam@egroups.com, "Steven Loomis" <srl@...> wrote:

> I hear a lot of comments in the USA from people who speak in terms
> of "standard" versus "foreign" alphabets, meaning latin versus
> non-latin.

Lucky guy you are! I wish I'd someone talked about alphabets
here in Italy, even just to say a blunder.

> Can anyone speak to if or how this perspective differs in other
> parts of the world?

The Latin script is also often called "English alphabet", especially
in Asia. The term is also used on most user interfaces on computer.
E.g., I have seen several Chinese and Thai software where the button
or menu command to switch the keyboard in Latin mode is labeled "E
(nglish)", "Ying(wen)", etc.

Sometimes "ASCII alphabet" is also heard in the computer field.

> Some alphabets are supersets or subsets, or have
> a large overlap (Serbian Cyrillic and Russian), how are these
> relationships perceived in everyday life?

I don't understand exctly what you mean, but I have a few questions
that are perhaps on the same line of thought.

When and how does it happen that the local variant of a script starts
to be considered a script on its own?

E.g., I remember that, around the 1970's, the Irish script was
considered an alphabet on its own, while today it is mostly
considered a variant of the Latin alphabet (like, e.g., Italic). How
did this happen? Or, on the other hand, I think that Cyrillic has
been considered a variant of Greek for a long while. When did it
start to be seen as an independent alphabet?

To paraphrase Weinrich, perhaps a graphic variant becomes an alphabet
when it starts to be used by the army?

Ciao.
_ Marco