Hello,
I am German, and I read both Roman (Antiqua) and Fraktur equally fluently. Hence I think, I have to correct some wrong claims issued in this thread.
Peter Kirk wrote:
A. Most Germans read texts in upper case Latin characters fluently. (assumed)
Wrong.
Texts in all upper-case Latin characters are read by far less fluently than the usual spelling in mixed case.
B. Most Germans cannot read texts in upper case Fraktur characters. (partly demonstrated by Dean and apparently accepted by all)
Completely irrelevant.
Fraktur characters are not designed to be used in all upper-case text as has been stated before, in this thread. Nobody is used to this sort of pseudo script; hence, nobody will read it fluently. This observation renders the whole Uppercase-Fraktur issue pointless.
C. [...] (derived from A and B) D. [...] (derived from C)
...
With the propositions proved wrong, this whole chain of reasoning breaks down.
K. [Dependent on I] Upper case Fraktur should be encoded separately from Latin (derived from D and I)
No way!
Roman (aka Antiqua) and Fraktur are used to write the same language (e. g. German) with the same orthography. As there is no particular encoding for Fraktur, the very same text can be displayed in either Roman or Fraktur without recoding it. I do not want this isomorphy to be broken.
These two variants of the Latin script are really not so different as some contributors in this thread are assuming. I have learned to read Fraktur without formal training: As most books available when I learned to read (in 1949) were set in Fraktur, I just read them (though at school we had books set in Antiqua).
I think that the case of old Phoenician vs. Hebrew is different, as there is no underlying common language and orthography -- but then I do know next to nothing about these scripts, so do not take this latter remark too seriously.
Best wishes, Otto Stolz
