From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Sep 12 2007 - 04:54:28 CDT
Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
> Infact VV is an example of discrimination by UC. If VV can be made single
> character, why (...) ?
Are you serious ???
Despite its (English) name W is not a double V or double U. Even in English!
The distinction as a separate letter was made centuries before UC ever
existed.
If UC considered your argument, then he would also need to deprecate J over
I, V over U, and many other Latin letters that have since acquired their own
identity separate from its origin meaning.
W is not a consonant conjunct, when in fact it's not clear that it is a
consonant or vowel, depending on language but also on words in languages
using it. IT may also represent a consonant plus vowel, or a vowel modifier.
All these variations of uses of the letter in the various languages using it
make it completely non-identifiable to a double V (VV) despite its partial
glyphic similarity, which may turn to be a double U (UU) or UV, or VU, or
HU, or UE in various words, or part of vocalic multigraphs.
The UC has not discrimated W; it chose to keep the centuries long
distinction because it was best not to choose the interpretation which
depends on long historic orthographic distinctions.
The same is true about X (there's absolutely NO clear "decomposition" into
separate consonants, as it depends on languages, orthographic traditions,
and words; for example, its "value" in French may be KS, or GZ, or LS, or KH
but there may be other "values" with imported words, such as R, or RH or
even completely unvoiced (and this is just about speaking about the phonetic
values, they are varying also due to regional accents, or contextually with
surrounding letters in the same word, or with letters in neighbouring words;
the main reason why the letter is kept unchanged despite its phonetic value
changes is for the etymology of radicals, and stability of grammatical rules
such as plural terminations).
As soon as you'll see that the letter may have various phonetic values and
there's no defined way to choose the interpretation, the best is not to
choose and here also, keep its separate identity, leaving the interpretation
to the languages using it and keeping it isolated. This is also conforming
to centuries of traditions and interpretation of the letter with a separate
identity in many languages, independantly of the computing technologies and
Unicode !
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