Re: script count?

Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 07:37 -0500 2003-12-12, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> >This involves nothing but a very strange definition of "script." No one
> >denies that there are four or more components of the Japanese writing
> >system, each with its own function. But to call the components "scripts"
> >is nothing short of bizarre.
>
> Why? The Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries are
> scripts, and the Latin alphabet is a script, and
> Han logowhatsits are a script.

For the 24 gazillionth time, define "script." Marco's parallel of
majuscule and minuscule roman letters is quite apt. (For me, "Latin"
script is the 23 letters used for writing Latin.)

> Janet Smith says "Modern Japanese is written in a
> mixture of three basic scripts: kanji, a
> logo-morphographic script; and hiragana and
> katakana, two syllabaries. Additionally, rômaji,
> 'romanization', eimoji 'English script' (roughly,
> non-Japanese words written in their [native]
> alphabetic script), and a variety of kigô
> 'symbols' are commonly interspersed in texts."
> (Japanese Writing, chapter 16, Daniels & Bright
> 1996).

Janet was writing many years before you started using some unfathomable
definition of "script" for phenomena from around the world.

If anything, what you chauvinistically and counterfactually call the
"Han ideograph script" might be a "writing system," which participates
in four different "scripts" -- the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean,
and the Vietnamese. But that doesn't make much sense either, since the
four sets of characters are not interchangeable.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...