Well, I vote for Han unification of #Unicode, and I rather think that more Chinese characters should have been unified (e.g., 高 & 髙, 產 & 産, 內 & 内).
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@pot Most of the character shapes in kanaare probably redrawn, not borrowed from a Brahmic script. Somebody probably picked a bunch of kanji, and pulled the standard rebus trick on them that people have been doing since time immemorial when building a phonetic script out of the concepts of a logographic script, in order to get characters that made sense in the Japanese context. But the character inventory is based on something closely related to Dewanagari.
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@riley what greek letter would you map o to? omicron or omega? what about hebrew? what about c, x, j, or w?
i hope we both find this absurd and you’re just using that as a point against unification rather than actually advocating for it
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Who says you have to align by the narrower alphabet?
If omicron/omega split is a thing in some alphabets, these could be used as the base, and one of them mapped into the round vowels of the alphabets that have only one round vowel.
In summary, Han Unification is an absurd idea and should never have been done at the code point level. A similar project, for defining (probably context-specific) mapping tables would have been much more sensible.
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Kagami is they/them 🏳️⚧️replied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee I guess we can merge them and do <span lang="ja">高</span> <span lang="zh-CN">高</span> in case it should be differentiated, as it will affect the font selection.
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@xarvos Also consider the problem of unifying en English alphabet that has the letters 'ƿ' and 'Ȝ' in it with an English alphabet that has eschewed them, or possibly created new letters with the old phonetic values.
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley Using your logic, shouldn't there also be separate sets of Latin characters for English, French, Italian, and German?
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洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley You are trying to convince me by deliberately muddying the waters between the shapes of the characters and the syllabic system. Even if the Japanese kana borrowed the idea of a syllabic system from the Brahmic, each hiragana's shape is derived from the cursive script of Chinese characters, and each katakana's shape is derived from a fragment of Chinese characters (hence 片仮名), which in turn is derived from the mayogana (万葉仮名).
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee It might actually make sense.
It happens, though, that most of the old European languages have many centuries of a history of being used together, and being thought of as local variations of a common script. This may also apply to the use of the Arabic script for a number of languages, but, arguably, breaks down at the point of Farsi, which has an Arabic-derived script that significantly differs from Arabic.
But there's also a bunch of Latin-script-using languages that don't neatly fit into the old European script-space, such as Esperanto. It might make sense to allocate a fully differentiated Unicode block to Esperanto, even if most of the West European languages are kept unified.
Speaking of East Asian languages, Vietnamese uses Latin script in a form modified so heavily that an even better case of mapping it distinctly from English, German, and French exists than for Esperanto.
Distinct mapping has numerous handy uses for purposes such as facilitating simple and automatic mapping between the Latin and Cyrillic rendering of Serbian, which is widely written in both scripts, and a similar mapping between the Hindi/Urdu, which is widely written in both the Dewanagari script and the Farsi version of Arabic script. Did I already mention that the latter should be considered distinct from the classic Arabic version of the Arabic script?
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Carlana Johnson :v_trans:replied to 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) last edited by
@hongminhee @riley @xarvos I have read in books that the *order* of the 50 sounds is derived from Siddhaṃ (not Devanagari!) but the shapes are unrelated, and up until the 20th century, iroha order was more commonly used that 50 sounds order.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Carlana Johnson :v_trans: last edited by
@carlana Siddham is a direct predecessor of Dewanagari.