Unicode characters unification

[Hans Åberg via Unicode]

> On 28 May 2018, at 17:00, Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 28 May 2018 15:30:55 +0200
> Hans Åberg via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> 
>>> On 28 May 2018, at 15:10, Richard Wordingham via Unicode
>>> <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mon, 28 May 2018 10:08:30 +0200
>>> Hans Åberg via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> It is not about precision, but concepts. Like B, Β, and В, which
>>>> could have been unified, but are not.  
>>> 
>>> Unifying these would make a real mess of lower casing!  
>> 
>> German has a special sign ß for "ss", without upper capital version.
> 
> That doesn't prevent upper-casing - you just have to know your
> audience.  

That would be the same if the Greek and Latin uppercase letters would have been unified: One would need to know the context.

> The three letters like 'B' have very different lower case
> forms, and very few would agree that they were the same letter.  

They were the same in the Uncial script, but evolved to be viewed as different. That is common with math symbols: something available evolving into separate symbols.

> For the
> same reason, there are two utter confusables in THE Latin SCRIPT for
> 00D0 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ETH.

The stuff is likely added for computer legacy, if there were separate encodings for those.

> More notably though, one just has to run
> the risk of getting a culturally incorrect upper case when rendering
> U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG; whether the three alternatives are the
> same letter is debatable.

Unified CJK Ideographs differ by stroke order.