At 08:25 -0500 2003-12-12, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>For the 24 gazillionth time, define "script."

I already said off the top of my head "They are
ordered collections of graphic elements used to
convey human language in writing".

ISO/IEC 10646 defines a script as "A set of
graphic characters used for the written form of
one or more languages."

The Unicode Standard defines script as "A
collection of symbols used to represent textual
information in one or more writing systems." It
defines writing system as "A set of rules for
using one or more scripts to write a particular
language. Examples include the American English
writing system, the British English writing
system, the French writing system, and the
Japanese writing system."

Daniels & Bright 1996 *equates* script with
writing system which it defines as "a signary
together with an associated orthography". A
signary is defined as a "general term for a
determined collection of characters (or signs)"

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

And for us, as has been pointed out numerous
times on this list, we use the term "Latin" to
describe those 23 letters and the extensions to
those letters used to write other languages, and
we use the term "Roman" as a font style related
to "Italic" and "Bold".

> > 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.

There is a large community of people who use the
term script the same way that I do, and frankly I
don't see a single thing in Janet's use of the
term that is in any way different from what I
said. Indeed, I said that Japanese is written in
four scripts, just as she has. And that was
before I read what she had written.

>If anything, what you chauvinistically

Han, CJK, CJKV, hanzi, hanja, kanji all refer to
what we have collected together as "CJK Unified
Ideographs".

>and counterfactually

How?

>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.

According to our definitions (see above), it is a
"script" which is used in four different "writing
systems". You are right, the four sets of
characters are not interchangeable; each language
uses a subset of the whole unified set.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com