Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

Paul Bennett wrote:
>On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 19:07:49 -0500, Herman Miller wrote:
>>Hmm.... I can't seem to find the specifics about what's new in 5.0.
>>What sorts of characters are included in Latin Extended C & D?
>
>See the Roadmaps at http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/
Many interesting new ones. I think my favourites are the "squirrel-tail p"
and the Norse digraphs.

...At risk of threadjack accusations, I'll use the opening to also fire a
question that's been bothering me for a while - Why does Unicode include
several characters multiple times? There are 6561 different ways to write
"THAI POEM". If capital alpha is different from capital ay just because it's
used in a different alphabet to write a different language, isn't (eg)
Icelandic "A" also a different character then? Are they really purposely
randomly tagging unnecessary etymological/usage information to symbols, or
is it that they just fudged it up initially (for whatever political reasons)
and can't fix it at this stage any more?

John Vertical

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