At 09:46 PM 12/12/2003, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > Hiragana and Katakana and Kanji and Romaji have different
> > names because they act and interact differently in Japanese
> > orthography.
>
>Precisely. They are not four avatars of some single thing called a
>"script."

No one asserted that, as far as I can tell (although I'll admit to not
reading all of Marco and Michael's exchange). Based on the distinction of
writing system and script I have put forward, the writing of Japanese could
be represented by a simple diagram, in which [ indicates a one-to-one
relationship between a writing system and a script, and { indicates that
the writing system is a subset of a script:

Kanji { Han logograms
Katakana [ Katakana
Hiragana [ Hiragana
Romaji { Latin

I'm perfectly willing to accept that this is irrelevant and of no interest
to a grammatologist. It is of interest, and of practical importance, to
text processing engineers, font developers, etc.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@...

What was venerated as style was nothing more than
an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
- Orhan Pamuk, _My name is red_