Little things that matter in language design

Posted Jun 16, 2013 7:58 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Little things that matter in language design by viro
Parent article: Little things that matter in language design

You can easily have a text in English with quoted sentences in French or in Turkish, using the same font. Try the same with e.g. Russian and Greek and see if you will be able to read the result[1].

Of course you could. What's the problem? You'll be forced to read Greek letter-by-letter probably, but English-speaking person will mangle French or Turkish, too. It's not as if just resemblance letters of the alphabet matters in this case: English and French may use similarly looking characters, but they use them to encode radically different consonants, vowels and words.

[1] lowercase glyphs aside, (И, Н) and (Η, Ν) alone are enough to render the result unreadable (shift circa 16th century, IIRC; at some point both Eta and Nu conterparts got the slant of the middle strokes changed in the same way, turning 'Ν' into 'Н' and 'Η' into 'И')

If you don't know which language is used you can not read your word, period. Identically-looking words in French and Turkish will have radically different pronouncements and will be, in fact, different words.