Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote: > I like to think of the long s as similar to the final sigma. Nobody > thinks that final sigma should be a presentation form of sigma.
In fact, my very first post to this list, in November 1997, was to ask whether sigma and final sigma were really just presentation forms of one another. (Ken Whistler replied that compatibility with ISO 8859-7 was largely responsible for the disunification.) Round s and long s are more different than medial sigma and final sigma, because English-language usage (prior to about 1820) generally calls for round s only at the end of a word, whereas German-language usage (non-Antiqua) calls for round s at subword boundaries as well. So even language information is not sufficient here; you have to know *which* Wachstube is meant. That would seem to justify separate encoding. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
