On 9/11/2013 9:50 PM, Charlie Ruland ☘ wrote:
One final remark: Thinking about it I have the impression that the blackletter vs. antiqua distinction once made in German very much resembles that made between Hiragana and Katakana in Japanese. In both cases the underlying systems of the corresponding scripts are essentially the same; yet it seems impossible to read the other script without further instruction and exercise; and in both languages one script is used primarily for inherited, and the other for foreign words.
The interesting situation is that this distinction is overlaid with the later shift to antiqua which gave rise to entire parallel texts as books were reissued in the more modern antiqua. it is that transition that is best supported by seeing Latin as a unified script. Faithful layout in Fraktur requiring more than a font shift, separate encoding might have been considered, had that transition not yet occurred..
A./
