On 26/05/2004 13:13, Peter Constable wrote:
My experience of living for seven years in a country undergoing a gradual script transition might be relevant here. In Azerbaijan the official script was changed from Cyrillic to Latin in 1991. But, before stricter laws were introduced around 2001 that all publications must be in Latin script, the majority of publications were in Cyrillic, except for those targetted at children who were learning Latin script at school. It was also common at one time to see newspapers with headlines in Latin and text in Cyrillic, and books with titles in Latin and text in Cyrillic. This was done because the publishers wanted to appear to support Latin script but also knew that most of their target audience was more comfortable reading Cyrillic. Some documents were published separately in both scripts, presumably so that they could be easily accessible to both adults and children....
So, the question is whether contemporaneous use within a single community suggests that they were viewed as the same or distinct. Either is possible. If they were considered "font" variants, then you might expect to see different documents using one or the other, or see different elements within a single document using one or the other. But if you see documents containing equivalent content repeated in each, then that might well suggest they were viewed as distinct.
Not much here which could not have taken place in Germany after the official abolition of Fraktur. Sorry, we are supposed to have moved away from that argument.
It is hard to say whether the two scripts were and are considered glyph variants or separate scripts. Probably more the latter (which is of course the Unicode view). But it was well recognised that the two scripts could be mapped on to one another one to one. And this was made use of in a number of legacy fonts using different encodings, Latin at Cyrillic code points and vice versa. It is also recognised that for several letters, at least as capitals, there is no distinction between the two forms. Indeed I have even seen a written word YEMÆKXAHA "cafe, canteen" which shifts from Cyrillic to Latin script in the middle of the word; all of the glyphs in this word are valid in both Latin and Cyrillic, but Y and H have different meanings in the two scripts, and in this word Y must be Latin and H must be Cyrillic.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
