Re: Phonetics

I think you are overcomplicating what is really a simple concept.

Forget Unicode.  When English-speakers say the alphabet has 26 letters, what
are they counting?  Not glyphs.  Certainly not bit patterns.  Those are
abstract characters.

You are, I think, interpreting "glyph" too broadly.  In Unicode terms, a
glyph is A SINGLE PARTICULAR GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION OF A CHARACTER.  There
are zillions of glyphs for Latin small letter a, but it is still one
character.  If you put a macron over it, that's still one character, even
though there are different Unicode code points you could use to construct
it.

At the bottom are the bits - that's the encoding.
Decode the bits and you get a sequence of Unicode code points (or "scalar
values').
Parse the combining characters, surrogate characters, etc. and you get a
sequence of "absters".
If you're rendering the text visually, you next pick a font, rendering
algorithm, etc. and apply it to the absters, and you get glyphs.

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