On Wed, 9 Jan 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> ...found it unreadable due to the Fraktur font that was used for German
> at the time. That is, the primary font used for Roman characters for
> German up until 1945 is unreadable for readers of German...
Minor quibble: the transition date was somewhat earlier, if you consider
practice in Germany to be authoritative for the German language. Use of a
more conventional Roman font for German was one of Hitler's minor reforms,
if I recall correctly.
More major quibble: I'm surprised that someone with serious background in
German hadn't been exposed to Fraktur fonts. There is still a *lot* of
old material written in them -- especially, I guess, in German communities
outside Hitler's former domain -- although very little new stuff has used
them for the last half-century.
However, the point remains valid: the Fraktur fonts, which have at least
a strong historical presence in Latin-alphabet texts, are unreadable to a
lot of Latin-alphabet users, and were nevertheless unified.
Henry Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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