Re: Number of writing systems

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

>
> 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.

Right. It's supposed to be an extralinguistic semantic system.
("Semiotic" may not yet have been known in Bliss's day.)

> >>>| 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.

"Latin" is just the 22 or so letters of the Latin alphabet. It might be
an extended roman, but not really.

> >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.

English & Spanish _are_ different writing systems with almost the same
script, no? (It's rarely important to make this distinction.) BABM is
just silly. (I don't know how I ended up with a copy of it!)

> 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.

Or typewriter designers. Just think, if you only had 88 slots for all of
Arabic, or for trying to do a roman/cyrillic/greek one!

> 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 "Ïý" and I think "Î2". 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 "É¡"; 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.

Neither IPA nor Visible Speech is a writing system -- it isn't used for
writing, just phonetic transcription.

> >>>| 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?

_We_ didn't. Shorthand manuals note that if the reporter (that's what
they're called) doesn't transcribe their notes (that's what they're
called) within a few days, they'll be uninterpretable. It's more a very
detailed mnemonic system than than anything else -- with minimal
redundancy and considerable potential ambiguity.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...