Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

On 1/9/06, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> ...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?
This is because Icelandic uses the same /script/ as English. Greek
uses a different /script/, therefore capital alpha gets its own
encoding, while Icelandic ay is encoded as the same as English ay.
Unicode stresses the distinctions between script, language (many of
which may use the same script), and glyph variants (which are left to
the realm of fonts, not text encodings).

Unicode certainly has fudged a bunch of stuff up initially, and
unfortunately they can't fix it now. (One thing in particular, I think
they should have encoded small caps a long time ago. One of the
proposals that was linked to included a small-cap F and S, and
mentioned that the only other small caps left unencoded were Q and X.
Interesting, I thought, so I went on a hunt for all the small caps
(other than F, Q, S, and X). I could only find a handful of them, and
they're randomly dotted all over the place: Latin Extended A, IPA
Extensions, Letterlike Symbols, etc. But anyway, enough of my rant.)

--
Hasta la pasta,
Jonathyn Bet'nct.
------------------------------------------------------------
I tried the real world once; didn't really care for it.

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Beth: Lisa, all dogs are boys, all cats are girls. Is that right, Max?
Max: Exactly.
Lisa: Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Daisy is
obviously, and I mean obviously, a girl.
Max: Oh we're not disputing that. It's not a question of sex, but of gender.
Lisa: Sex and gender are the same thing.
Max: Uh, not so. I would much rather have sex than gender.
Lisa: Since you have neither that must be very sad for you.

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