On 17 October 2010 01:03, wren ng thornton <[email protected]> wrote: > On 10/15/10 6:59 AM, Michal Suchanek wrote: >> AFAIK languages can use one or multiple writing systems that fall into >> these categories >> >> 1) simple,alphabet - every letter represents a single consonant or >> vowel with a few simple exceptions (like small groups of letters >> having special meaning) - Greek, German, Latin, Russian, .. >> >> 2) syllabic,syllabary - a letter represents a syllable, possibly with >> optional vowels, combining marks for vowels, etc. Japanese Kana, >> Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Indic scripts, ... > > From a linguistic/typographic perspective, syllabic writing systems are > completely different from semitic writing systems. I have no clue how > Arabic and Hebrew are handled in Unicode, but they should not be > conflated anywhere outside of Unicode that's for sure. >
Yes, they are different, technically. Arabic only has letters for consonants and diacritic marks for vowels while Hebrew is a full alpahbet, only the vowels are usually omitted in writing so long as they can be inferred (in sentences that don't incude exotic words). From the point of view of somebody who does not speak either the difference is still negligible. Thanks Michal _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
