Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

On 26/10/2007, Mark E. Shoulson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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.

That is exactly the analogy I was thinking of. Thorn and Y were
originally distinct letters, but because of the way the (blackletter)
script evolved they became almost indistinguishable.

Likewise, in Chinese seal script the ri "sun" and yue "speak" radicals
are quite distinct, but because of the way the Chinese script evolved
they are quite confusable in the modern kaiti script.

Andrew