At 10:14 -0800 2003-11-10, Curtis Clark wrote:
Why isn't Latin Serbian just Cyrillic Serbian with funny glyphs?
Because Latin and Serbian are self-evidently different scripts.
I'm not trying to be intentionally dense here; Theban English and Serbian are different in many ways. But are there truly no edge cases, where whim is the only deciding factor? And how does whim turn into policy?
We can't write meta-rules for everything, Curtis. And it isn't a good use of my time, anyway, to try. "Informed whim" if you will.
Whim sounds about right. And this isn't a criticism. I honestly doubt I could satisfactorily defend the choice of unifying French "A" and English "A" but not Russian "A" against a determined Devil's Advocate. We wind up like Justice Potter Stewart and pornography: maybe we can't define it, but we know it when we see it. And there will be edge cases, yes, where not all of us agree on seeing it. Whim is all we have to go on; run with it.
~mark
