Re: What justification for separately encoding two forms of lowercase sigma

From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 23 2009 - 08:08:04 CDT

  • Next message: Petr Tomasek: "Re: What justification for separately encoding two forms of lowercase sigma"

    On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 4:34 AM, Shriramana Sharma<samjnaa@gmail.com> wrote:
    > Correct me if I am wrong, but the single Greek letter sigma is said to have
    > two different forms, one in word-final and other in other places. These are
    > encoded in Unicode as 03C2 and 03C1 respectively.
    >
    > Now are these two symbols not just two different ways of writing the same
    > character? If yes, how can they be separately encoded? Is it only to keep
    > compatibility with some earlier standard? Or can these two actually be
    > considered as two different characters?

    Greek is a simple script. You have a choice of duplicating one
    character, like has always been done for Greek keyboards, or you can
    force all the Greek users to learn how to use characters like ZWJ--in
    fact forcing them to think in Unicode terms--so one character can be
    saved and the encoding is arguably theoretically a bit cleaner. It's
    not worth the trade-off. 

    -- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Aug 23 2009 - 08:13:03 CDT