Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[Richard Wordingham]

On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 13:57:23 +0100
Christian Kleineidam via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> At the time of the design italics weren't used for
> expressing fundamentally semantic meaning such as "Homo
> neanderthalensis" referring to a a species as it's used in the title
> of the above paper.

I just looked in a 1969 reprint of a school biology textbook published
in 1966.  It consistently italicises generic names such as _Drosophila_
within sentences, so I find your claim hard to credit.

Of course, typewritten materials had to resort to underlining to
indicate italicisation in such cases.  I think I've seen such usage,
but my memory may not be reliable.

Richard.