From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jun 09 2004 - 12:55:53 CDT
[choosing not to cross-post to all three lists]
> From: hebrew-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:hebrew-bounce@unicode.org] On
Behalf
> Of Mark E. Shoulson
> The Tanaaim pretty clearly did not view this as a matter of
font-variants.
In fairness, Unicode does not encode legal judgments any more than it
does the phonology of any given language. To say that the Tanaaim
considers two groups of letterforms to be distinct seems to me to be
comparable to saying that speakers of English distinguish phonemes /k/
and /s/, and just as we don't use that as an argument to encode both a
"hard" c and a "soft" c, I don't think we can use a legal distinction as
an argument for or against distinct encoding.
On the other hand, to the extent that the legal judgment can be seen as
a reflection of perceptions of script identity by an entire society,
that may be relevant.
Peter
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division
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