Another example might be German ß (U+00DF). Many people don't use it,
indeed I think it has been officially abolished, but many others do use
it. Suppose that it wasn't already in Unicode, and someone suggested it
shouldn't be added but should be encoded as ss with markup. I don't
think that would be acceptable to those who still use it. But the case
for ß is weaker than for holam vav as ß is not phonetically distinct
from ss but holam vav is pronounced very differently from vav plus holam.
Well _ß_ is distinguished from _ss_ in German because there is in theory a distinction in pronunciation in respect to the preceding vowel, though this doesn't always occur in everyone's speech or in all compound words.
Accordingly _ß_ is not used in Swiss German and the rules for the use of _ß_ have changed somewhat in the recent German spelling reform within Germany.
A better example might be the conjoined _oe_ digraph in French. This is normally missing from typwriters and also from many computer character sets. But it would be rare not do disintinguish if from non-conjoined _oe_ in typography. Here also the difference indicates a pronunciation difference.
Yet I've talked to French speakers at various times some years back who had never noticed the difference until I pointed it out to them. (Using the _oe_ digraph in a Courier-style font tended to make them suddenly aware of it, especially in a word in full capitals.)
Copy text in French often used the separarted _oe_ where the conjoined _oe_ was typographically correct. I would always fix it. But occasionally I would receive a complaint about the conjoined _oe_. Asking the complainer to reference a French dictionary or any French printed book was usually sufficient answer.
The dawning realization that they had probably seen this difference all their lives and never noticed it was sometimes humorous to watch.
I expect more are aware of it now because the _oe_ digraph is included in both Windows Codepage 1252 and MacRoman (as well as Unicode).
This case is very similar to the Hebrew case in that in both we have a typographical variation which indicates a pronuciation difference, but this typographical difference is not noticed by many native speakers of the language even though they read texts that observe the difference.
Jim Allan
