Michael Everson wrote:

>
> Peter,
>
> I respect your work. I consider D&B to be one of the bibles I use in
> my work; it has been of immense use to me. I believe -- absent
> civilizational collapse -- that the work I have done to encode
> scripts in Unicode will be used for centuries, and much of that work
> depends on what D&B has taught me. Your work has found practical
> applications, which is a Good Thing.
>
> The tone of discussion on this list has ranged from adversarial to,
> well, a bit snotty, of late. For my part I count this as just part of
> the richness of discourse of smart human beings. I disagree with you
> on some points, but I consider you a colleague and ally; I hope you
> consider me the same. There *are* differences in the things we do: we
> describe writing systems, we theorize about the nature and
> classification of writing systems, and we try to take the knowledge
> we derive from studying writing systems and put it into practical
> implementation so that people who want to *use* those writing systems
> on computers can do so.
>
> I think that most of the clashes we are having hang upon difference
> in terminology.
>
> Even if occasionally acrimonious, these discussions are useful for us
> all. If we disagree, let us do so, but let us try to know why. In any
> event, let us endeavour to avoid falling out.
>
> I trust that you will take this declaration on my part at face value.
> I don't like sniping for its own sake.

How about this: to a grammatologist, writing system vs. script is like
language vs. dialect to a linguist. Neither interesting nor relevant nor
decidable within the system.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...