Tex Texin scripsit:
> I had seen this, but wondered about it because I have been looking at
> Nakanishi's book and in the Scripts of Europe chapter (first one) and it
> remarks about each language being the Latin script plus a couple characters.
I think he is using "script" in a different sense, as a cover term for
"alphabet", "syllabary", "abjad", etc. It's right to say that the
Danish alphabet is the Latin alphabet (= alphabet of the Latin language)
plus a few characters. But both languages use what we rather arbitrarily
call the Latin script, "script" here in the Unicode sense.
It's always annoyed me that when we transliterate into the Latin script,
the process is called romanization, but that seems to be the state of
the jargon.
> However, Latin script as defined here included some changes
> since Latin was used (e.g. arabic numerals, gothic characters) but not these
> other character additions. I thought there might be some criteria for what was
> in and what was not in.
I would hesitate to say that the European digits are part of the Latin
script, since (a) they aren't used to write linguistic texts as such,
and (b) they are just as much in use with the Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian,
Georgian, Cherokee scripts.
> Maybe it is just convention or tradition for what is considered "Latin" or
> "Cyrillic"?
Well, sure. The characters don't have a stamp of origin, they do borrow
things from one another, and all assignments have some fuzzy boundaries.
When Kurdish is written in Cyrillic, it uses "q" and "w". Are these
novel Cyrillic letters, or are they just the familiar Latin letters?
Currently Unicode says the latter.
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