Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
>
>>Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>* Mark E. Shoulson
>>>|
>>>| I note that Shavian is there, but Visible Speech isn't.
>>>
>>>The artificial scripts section is admittedly somewhat spotty. The
>>>phonetics part is even worse.
>>>
>>>
>>Visible Speech just doesn't get the coverage it deserves... Well, when
>>we can get it into Unicode, we'll have something to start with.
>>
>>
>
>Mike MacMahon was very kind to it in WWS.
>
>

WWS is also more thorough than most of the things I'd be complaining
about. It's good that it got some coverage. It needs to get into
Unicode. And someday I'll do something about
http://www.visiblespeech.info/ I suppose... :)

>>>| Nor Blissymbolics.
>>>
>>>Yep.
>>>
>>>
>>Should it be?
>>
>>
>
>By my definition, no. (See my review of Rogers's textbook, posted here
>recently.)
>
>

I don't know enough about Blissymbolics to make such a judgement; I was
figuring there might be a problem because I *thought* Blissymbolics
isn't language-specific (i.e. it doesn't encode utterances), but like I
said, I don't know enough.

>>>| Does the IPA count as a writing system, or is it just an extended
>>>| form of Latin?
>>>
>>>I'd consider it a phonetic writing system, like Dania. (Whether it
>>>should count or not depends what you want to count. :)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>And I'd have considered it an extended use of Latin, actually.
>>
>>
>
>Which is more important: Form, or function?
>
>

Well, that's the question, I guess. Function can't be the only
important thing, or English would be a different writing system than
Spanish, since the functions of the vowels are quite different. Or
BABM's writing system, which uses the Latin letters as a syllabary. Or
any bizarre re-assignment of Latin letters to sounds.

Form probably IS important, but also can't be the only thing, or we'd
have to conflate half the Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin alphabets all
together. It's angels and pins again.

To me, IPA uses Latin letters with specific, standardized meanings
(which are close to how they are used in many/most other applications of
the Latin alphabet) and Latin diacritics, with the addition of other
special diacritics and characters which are usually variations on Latin
characters, some of which come from considering what is usually
different forms of the same letter to be different letters.

There's much the same fight occasionally springing up in Unicode-land.
We have the special IPA characters in Unicode, of course, but many of
the IPA chars are encoded only as Latin "b", "c", "j", etc, but also
Greek "θ" and "χ" and I think "β". But then, is it really correct to
use (as we do) regular Latin "a" for the low front unrounded vowel, as
distinct from "ɑ" (which itself is not to be confused with Greek "α")?
What if we're in a font where the "a" is single-storied? We do have a
special IPA "ɡ"; is this being inconsistent? Possibly. It would
probably make the most sense to view things as you do, that IPA is a
writing system unto itself, and encode all its characters specially, but
that flies in the face of too much tradition and legacy data. (So I
guess I'm agreeing with what I had said I disagreed with. Deal). I
think Henry Sweet considered that one of the advantages of Visible
Speech, that it *was* its own writing system and wasn't reusing other
characters. Too late to clean up the mess now.

>>>| And the International Teaching Alphabet? And Unifon?
>>>
>>>Dunno.
>>>
>>>
>>Those are... um... modifications of Latin? Modified enough to be
>>"different"? Probably, yeah. They're not just special fonts.
>>
>>
>
>NB ita has no caps -- just bigger forms of the letters.
>
>

Whereas Unifon has no lowercase, not even in size difference.

Say, did we count things like Gregg Shorthand?

~mark