* á. . ³áá¤á á. .
|
| It seems the recurring theme is that "new technology hurts
| alphabets" which is a little troubling but tells us something about
| the sophistication of writing itself.
That's one way of seeing it, but there's a different theme in these
postings as well, I think, and that is that cultural change is just
that, cultural change. It's not inherently good or bad, it's just
change, and change happens all the time for all sorts of reasons.
Marco Cimarosti listed three different cases which I would consider
improvements to the original scripts caused by technological change.
Similarly with the Thai example posted by Cormac (and questioned by
Peter Constable). From what he said it sounded as if those two vowels
were not needed, so losing them was an improvement.
I think when technological limitations cause single letters or
diacritically marked letters to turn into digraphs that is not so
good, but when they cause the loss of obsolete letters (who needs
'c'?) and make the scripts more systematic they are good.
So while it is easy to think that all change is for the worse I think
that is not actually the case.
| I guess thats an economic force.
I think that is precisely it. Software companies don't support Chinese
characters because they like them, but because at least one billion
people use them. Similarly, the reason it has taken so long for the
Sami to get the few extra Latin characters they need supported is that
there is very few of them and so they have almost no economic power.
This is also what killed Deseret, by all accounts, and so on...
| On the technology plus side, we're communicating now of course, and
| the world has gained lots of :-)s
:-)
--
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian <URL:
http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC <URL:
http://www.garshol.priv.no >