Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

John H. Jenkins wrote:
>
> On Oct 26, 2007, at 8:14 AM, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
>> Unicode generally tries to code what's written more than what's 
>> meant, I thought.
>>
>
>
> Well, not really.
>
> Unicode tries to formalize the informal understanding that users of a 
> script bring to it. In the case of x, "everybody" knows that it's the 
> same letter in English as in Spanish. In East Asia, there are a number 
> of cases where "everybody" knows that two entities are separate 
> characters even if they look almost the same and in fact may be 
> indistinguishable in practice.
OK, I'll buy that. It also answers other common questions: "everybody" 
knows that Cyrillic А is distinct from Latin A, despite common origin 
and identical typographic treatment, etc. And it leads to the problems 
you mention, as "everybodies" disagree.

Andrew West's clarification of how they got to be same-but-different was 
also helpful. It's a little like the y in "ye olde shoppe", which by 
rights should be coded "þe", since it isn't a y but a thorn; the 
distinction between the two wore away. OK, not a good example because 
there it IS unified with the y and here the argument is for keeping them 
separate, but whatever.

(For that matter, [email protected]'s point about i/j and I/l was good 
too. Just didn't want people to think I was ignoring their arguments...)

~mark