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Thank you for typing all of that out. First of all, I should like to apologize for the tone in my last post. It seems quite strange to me to say that blackletter is not a font/typeface/script (or a clade of such objects). Historically, before we have mixed usage of the scripts, they absolutely were different typefaces, and the distinction between who used blackletter and who used roman was obviously one of time and place. The two are closely related, like dialects, but they are distinct. Now, mixing scripts is also common as you mention, as has the recruitment of single symbols like the use of blackletter in mathematics. But, I mean, Hebrew letters have also been used. Does that make them part of our script in any sense? As I hinted at I have some knowledge of some languages of the Islamic world, and as you know the inclusion of Arabic words and phrases, written in the Arabic script, is very common in texts written in non-Arabic languages. It is similar to how Western philosophers routinely write Greek words without transliteration to look smart. As humans, we have no problem switching between different scripts and languages that we have knowledge of. Now, computers do have such problems, hence Unicode to capture all of it instead of the mess that came before. But they're still distinct scripts. Now, contrast that with case. The concept of case is at the very core of the modern Latin alphabet in all its derivations. The history of it is completely different to the distinction between roman and blackletter. The alternation between uppercase and lowercase is not something that occurs only in specialist contexts, nor is it analogous to mathematicians running out of symbols and recruiting new ones from different scripts. I'm simply saying that 'A' and 'a' have a relationship that's similar to the one between their blackletter counterparts, but the relationship between those two sets is very different. And I don't think inventing a category like "letters that get a different letter-form because of rules about what's being written" is very helpful, except maybe outside of the very specific technical context of solving the problem Unicode is solving. (By the way, you make it sound like you are part of the Unicode process? If so, thank you very much for your service.) |
Color me surprised. Thank you for saying so.
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> It seems quite strange to me to say that blackletter is not a font/typeface/script (or a clade of such objects). Historically, before we have mixed usage of the scripts, they absolutely were different typefaces, and the distinction between who used blackletter and who used roman was obviously one of time and place. The two are closely related, like dialects, but they are distinct.
I don't mean to seem rude, but it's not at all clear to me how you can believe this.
Typefaces begin with the invention of movable type, which depending on what you count as "enough" is probably Bi Sheng. However since the context is blackletter and international trade hadn't emerged yet, we're stuck with Laurens Janszoon Coster in context. His work is generally believed to have been around 1420, though records aren't terribly clear. (Any number involving 420 is pretty good though, so just run with it.)
Prior to this, in European context, there is no such thing as a typeface.
The emergence of blackletter is contentious - it's not clear whether to include gothic miniscule (or, at the other end, textura) - but my preference is for the standard issue of 1150, about 300 years before type existed.
Blackletter is so old that its nearest unambiguous parent is Carolingian.
Blackletter is older than fully 70% of yo momma jokes, both in content and target.
Amusingly, it is actually well known and well documented that the first typeset Gutenberg used was blackletter. This seems invalidating to me.
https://blog.thepapermillstore.com/history-of-typography-hum...
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> the distinction between who used blackletter and who used roman was obviously one of time and place
My problem with the word "obviously" is that in my personal experience, it has been more often used about things that are incorrect than things that are correct.
Blackletter has been pretty squarely relegated to The Bible, in truth. Its emergent use in mathematics is recent, and the result of our running out of several other groups of symbols to use - they had already run through latin, cyrillic, latin, greek, doublestruck, bold, italics, capital variants of all the preceding, and a variety of related symbols.
Kanzlei, the ancestor of the font, was developed by monks for the specific purpose of producing visually pleasing, salable bibles. As this preceded movable type, Bibles, which were very long, were intensely expensive - sometimes a full year of a person's income. This is also why they were so ornately decorated.
Frankly, it's an awful font, and should never be used for anything. Not even wedding invitations. And for once, all of humanity (you know, the same humanity that still uses comic sans) just stayed away, probably because of the intense eye pain.
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> But, I mean, Hebrew letters have also been used. Does that make them part of our script in any sense?
No. It makes them a part of mathematics, which is not a part of "our" script either.
As far as I know, this starts and stops with aleph. Aleph in hebrew is U+05D0. Aleph in mathematics is U+2135.
Are there any other Hebrew letters in use by math at all?
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> as you know the inclusion of Arabic words and phrases, written in the Arabic script, is very common in texts written in non-Arabic languages
Transclusion of foreign segments is formally irrelevant to the nature of native orthographies.
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> But they're still distinct scripts.
Unicode has a vast and unweildly array of counterexamples in its documentation, some of which were already linked for you, but I'm glad that you're confident.
Again: swiss eszett.
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> Now, contrast that with case. The concept of case is at the very core of the modern Latin alphabet in all its derivations.
This is, of course, 100% incorrect. The Latin alphabet was 100% what we would call uppercase until around 200 ad, and miniscule didn't normalize across the language for another 300 years.
Latin spend more time monocameral than bicameral by more than triple. We currently think of Latin as emerging in 700 BC, and we typically think of the death of Latin as the second fall of Rome in 476 AD.
So in reality, Latin was single case for 900 years and double case for less than 300.
I strongly recommend you start verifying your beliefs before presenting them as fact. You're batting 1 for 19 at the time of this writing.
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> The history of it is completely different to the distinction between roman and blackletter.
The academics do not agree.
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> The alternation between uppercase and lowercase is not something that occurs only in specialist contexts
I never said it was, and this is not the case of most of my examples.
I feel that you are arguing for the sake of arguing, and have lost track of my intent for the hope of going for each sentence out of context.
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> nor is it analogous to mathematicians running out of symbols and recruiting new ones from different scripts.
Cool, didn't say this was either.
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> I'm simply saying that 'A' and 'a' have a relationship that's similar to the one between their blackletter counterparts
Say that as many times as you like. The historians and linguists don't agree, even though you have a belief system to display.
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> And I don't think inventing a category like "letters that get a different letter-form because of rules about what's being written" is very helpful
That's nice. I didn't invent that. I'd tell you to talk to the person who did, but he's been dead for more than a thousand years.
Kinda spooky.
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> except maybe outside of the very specific technical context of solving the problem Unicode is solving.
"Except outside of the very specific technical context of the exact thing this post and you were talking about, and has been the core of your point the whole time."
Thanks, I guess.
I'd respond, but I think this isn't very helpful, except maybe outside of the outside of the very specific technical context of human language as it's used on Earth
Imagine trying to argue what things actually count as letters, then begging out "you're being too technical"