Subject: [Ltru] Re: Moving Forward

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 23:42:18 -0700

Randy Presuhn <randy underscore presuhn at mindspring dot com>

> Technical question: how do you envision the entries for languages like
> Vietnamese, which within relatively recent history have had multiple
> scripts, but which currently are written (exclusively, AFAIK) in a
> single script?

As someone who has a fair amount of contact with Vietnamese, I would
associate its modern use with Latin almost as much as I would English.
Wikipedia is correct:  "Although a vast cultural heritage and history
remains written in chữ nôm, few Vietnamese today can read it."

For the same reason, I would associate Korean with Hangul rather than
"either Hangul or Hanja."  One often hears that South Koreans on either
side of the Pacific continue to use hanja for decoration and personal
names (unlike the North Koreans, for whom hanja are banned), but the
fact is that even these uses are extremely limited.  I recently scanned
through a 12-page section of a Korean-language newspaper filled with
decorative ads, and found not a single hanja.

I guess Randy's question could be asked in the context of, say, Turkish.
Turkish was once written almost exclusively in Arabic; now it is written
almost exclusively in Latin.  If the goal of indicating a default script
(by whatever name) is to reflect modern usage, which seems reasonable,
then Turkish should be associated with Latin (so no Associated_Script
fields here).

Naturally, this shows again that default-script is not incontrovertible.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 09:48:02 -0400

> then Turkish should be associated with Latin (so no Associated_Script

Indeed it should, the more so because Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish
are really two separate languages with a major vocabulary barrier 
(Persian and Perso-Arabic words in Ottoman that aren't found in modern
Turkish) between them.  Indeed, they have separate ISO 639-2 codes,
ota and tur respecitvely.

Geoffrey Lewis's book _The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic
Success_ is a witty and informative account of the ins and
outs of the process that led to modern standard Turkish.  (See
http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-823856-8 for details.)

-- 
By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you shall     [email-masked]
have neither the Ring nor me!  --Frodo          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 08:07:12 -0700

> ota and tur respecitvely.

Whoops, I forgot *yet again* about ota.  Bad example.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California