Lars, > | > | 2. Script B is a de novo design influenced strongly by Script A. > | > | 3. Script B borrowed formal and/or functional characteristics of > | Script A. > > This is good advice. I already have an association type called > 'derived from' that corresponds to your 1. I have been deliberating > whether to add an association type for your 2., probably to be called > 'influenced by'. (I will probably drop the requirement that the design > be de novo, however.) > > I am not sure if it is possible to distinguish 3. from 2., though. Can > you give examples of differences?
Yes. Xi Xia is a good example of a de novo design influenced strongly by Han. Somebody sets out to create a script for a language that had none, and deliberately clones concepts from another script to do so. This process is related to the notion of creating a transcription system for an unwritten language, except that one goes further and invents the *script* as well as the transcription. The kind of thing I am thinking about for 3 could be exemplified by the modern Tai Le orthography. It is an evolutionary descendant of earlier SE Asian Brahmi-based scripts maybe 800 years ago. But the 1954 orthographic reform introduced the systematic representation of tones with combining diacritics. And the particular combining diacritics are basically a structural loan from Latin (as opposed to Thai, which *could* have been taken as the model, but wasn't). The 1988 orthographic reform added tone letters, whose shapes seem based on Greek or Latin letters, and whose concept is derived, again, from Latin transcriptions using tone letters. > > I feel that some device is needed to cluster the scripts into groups > in order to explain how they are related to one another historically. > If you can think of a better solution I am certainly open to > suggestion. One obvious device you are missing is geographic area. That is the mechanism we use to help organize the Unicode Standard. It is obviously related to historic connections, but is not everywhere the same, and is an easier organizing principle for most people to start from. --Ken
