[choosing not to cross-post to all three lists] > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of Mark E. Shoulson
> The Tanaaim pretty clearly did not view this as a matter of font-variants. In fairness, Unicode does not encode legal judgments any more than it does the phonology of any given language. To say that the Tanaaim considers two groups of letterforms to be distinct seems to me to be comparable to saying that speakers of English distinguish phonemes /k/ and /s/, and just as we don't use that as an argument to encode both a "hard" c and a "soft" c, I don't think we can use a legal distinction as an argument for or against distinct encoding. On the other hand, to the extent that the legal judgment can be seen as a reflection of perceptions of script identity by an entire society, that may be relevant. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
