Re: Vowel romanization

E fésto Joe <joe@...>:
> Tristan McLeay wrote:
>> On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Ray Brown wrote:
>>> In fact, the dual alphabet system is an odd aberration, found only, I
>>> believe, in the modern Roman, Greek & Cyrillic systems. Older alphabets
>>> knew of no such system and, till the present day, the Hebrew & Arabic
>>> alphabets have no such dual systems, nor do the abugidas of India &
>>> Ethiopia, nor the Korean hangul alphabet nor, AFAIK any other alphabet,
>>> abjad or abugida.
>>
>> doesn't or didn't the georgian alphabet do it? (i know there are three,
>> and I thought two are or were used together as uppercase and lowercase,
>> no doubt influenced by the roman alphabet?) (AND HOW DID THE ROMANS
>> SHOVT IN TEXT IF THIS IS NORMAL? :) (j/k)
>
> Indeed.  Don't forget Japanese - though, obviously, they don't use them
> as capital and lower case, they still have a dual(or even trial,
> counting kanji) writing system.
I think different *forms* of writing system are common:  minuscules from
majuscules, katakana hiragana from kanji, mkhedruli from mrgvlovani [or
whatever].  Sometimes one form is handwritten and one is printed (like
Hebrew), one is used for special kinds of emphasis (Georgian, Japanese,
italics), or maybe they get used as we think of as upper and lower case
(Latin, Greek, Cyrillic--though even there different languages have
different conventions).

Actually I had a coworker showing me Hebrew script once that referred to
the printed forms as "capitals".

	*Muke!
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