Terminology (was: Latin glottal stop in ID in NWT, Canada)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 23:16:32 +0100
> From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com>
> 
> "C6: A process shall not assume that the interpretations of two
> canonical-equivalent character sequences are distinct."
> 
> Firstly, I have grave difficulties assigning mental activities to
> processes.
> 
> Secondly, it may be possible to interpet "A process shall not assume X"
> as "A process shall function correctly regardless of whether X holds."
> 
> However, let image(Y) be the bitmap depicting the string Y.  Then the
> following logic would be non-compliant:
> 
> if A and B are canonically equivalent and image(A) and image(B) are
> different, then
>     write(A, " and ", B, "are canonically equivalent but have different
>     images ", image(A), " and ", image(B));
> end if
> 
> The logic is non-compliant, for if it is invoked then the write
> statement will only work correctly if image(A) and image(B) are
> different, i.e. if A and B are interpreted differently. Apparently it
> is permissible to render canonically equivalent sequences differently, so
> image(A) and image(B) might be different even though canonically
> equivalent.
> 
> I therefore conclude that C6 is in some language that I do not
> adequately understand.

AFAIU, Unicode is about processing text, and only mentions display
rarely, where it's directly related to the processing part.  So the
above is about _processing_ canonically-equivalent sequences, not
about their display.  When looked at in this way, I see no
difficulties in understanding the text.

> > Again, I do know nothing about Thai, but if in TUS an abugida can be
> > addressed to as an alphabet if the same is used as such, it seems to
> > me that the word 'alphabet' has a pretty extended meaning in TUS.
> 
> TUS tries to make accurate use of the distinction between 'alphabet',
> 'abugida' and 'abjad', 20th century jargon promoted if not invented by
> Peter Daniels.  The distinction lies in the way vowels are indicated -
> always / with a default / not at all.  The distinction may be useful
> for a writing system, i.e. a way of using the 'script', but it rapidly
> encounters the problem that a script may have several different writing
> systems.  For example, the presence or absence of vowel marks switches
> the Arabic and Hebrew scripts, as used for those languages, between
> being an abjad and being an alphabet.

The Hebrew script is never an alphabet, AFAIU, it's likely an abugida
when the vowel marks are used.  The so-called "full spelling", where
some vowels are indicated by consonants, does not replace all the
vowels with consonants, so it isn't, strictly speaking, an alphabet in
the above sense.