A 1997-11-28 01:57:27, Michael Everson escribiķ:
> The form is the glyph. If you would recognize both forms as a
> representation of the same thing (i.e. it means no difference which
> is used in a given word) then in principle they are supposed to be
> unified as characters and some process is to tell the computer
> whether it is to be rendered as "oy" or as "8".
As I read this, I keep thinking about U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL
SIGMA and U+03C3 GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA. If I am not mistaken,
these are indeed just presentation variants, and there is indeed a
straightforward rule (end-of-word) to determine which glyph should be
displayed. So, strictly speaking, this principle would seem to point
to the unification of U+03C2 and U+03C3 (and several similar pairs in
the Hebrew block, for that matter).
I suspect that compatibility with existing coded character sets had
a lot to do with encoding U+03C2 and U+03C3 separately. After all,
there are plenty of coded character sets for Greek and Hebrew, but
not many for Old Church Slavonic. Is this correct?
-Doug Ewell
dewell@compuserve.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:38 EDT