Re: Perception that Unicode is 16-bit (was: Re: Surrogate space i

[Michael Everson]

At 07:25 -0800 2001-02-26, John Cowan wrote:
>Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
>>- "Script" is a generic term meaning a writing system of any kind, its
>>inventory of signs and its orthographic rules.
>>
>>- "Alphabet" is a specific class of scripts, whose principal characteristic
>>is that tends to map each sign to one of the language's phonemes.
>
>I think that should rather be called an "alphabetic script", e.g. Latin,
>Greek, Cyrillic.

Yes, an alphabet proper is usually the subset of an alphabetic
script. Armenian seems to be the exception, as it is only used for
one language; Georgian, Latin, Cyrillic, Ogham, Runic, and Greek have
been used for other languages.
--
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