Peter Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:There are also documents that use both kaf and keheh as they are distinct characters in some languages. On 27th January Jonathan Kew wrote to the Unicode bidi list:
But do we take U and V as different presentation forms of one character? Should one of them be only in the PUA? Surely not.
But there are documents that use u and v, like those referring to vultures. As far as I can tell, there are no documents that use both of these ligated th's, so the cases aren't parallel.
Sindhi *does* have a distinction between two "kaf" characters, as it writes unaspirated /k/ and aspirated /kh/ with distinct characters (not using a digraph for /kh/, as Urdu does). The plain /k/ is written with a "swash kaf" form (see U+06AA), while /kh/ is written with a "keheh" form (U+06A9). So there is a clear need for a plain-text distinction between two "kaf" letters in Sindhi.
Now I know that "swash kaf" is not the same as kaf, so the situation is not as simple as I had remembered. But the point remains that letters which seem to be graphical variants in one language may in fact be distinct letters in another language. That is one good reason to avoid hasty unification of characters. I don't think it applies to your various th ligatures, but then there could well be a dictionary out there somewhere which uses one of your supposedly equivalent ligatures for the voiced th and another one for the unvoiced th.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
