Michael responded to Peter: > At 06:39 -0700 2004-04-30, Peter Constable wrote: > > >Has it struck anyone else that it might make best sense to consider > >Fraser just an extension of Latin -- so we just need to encode the > >turned capitals? Or is there more to it I'm not thinking about? > > Evidence (or lack thereof) suggests that Fraser doesn't participate > in the normal behaviour of Latin, including its glyph variation, its > cursivity in writing, its casing behaviour, even italicization as > opposed to obliquity.
And since nobody on this thread has noted this yet, Fraser is *not* an alphabet, but an abugida. The consonants have an inherent "a" vowel, which is overridden by use of another vowel to form ke, ki, ko, ku type syllables. Fraser is a constructed script, built on Brahmic script principles, and with a de novo tone marking system. It happens to share many Latin letter forms for the abugida's consonants (and some vowels) because the inventor of Fraser wasn't very creative about grapheme design. :-) But *some* of the Latin letter forms are put to completely novel consonant usage, and then there are all the arbitrary flipped letters. Fraser is to Latin approximately as Tangut is to Han. It is what you get when you create a de novo script for a completely different language, but you have a very limited notion of what a "letter" is supposed to look like. It really doesn't do anybody a real service to encode Fraser as an extension of Latin, in my opinion. It should just be treated as a script in its own right. That would enable Lisu users of the Fraser script to properly distinguish it from, e.g. Roman pinyin that they might also be using (with different typography) and from running into the typographic complexities of fonts that would have *some* of the Fraser characters as Latin letters, but be missing the odd extensions, if it were treated just as a extension to Latin. --Ken
