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

[Christian Kleineidam]

 On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 11:38 PM Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:

> Christian Kleineidam wrote:
>
> > "Evidence suggesting that 𝐻𝑜𝑚𝑜 𝑛𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑠
> contributed the H2
> > 𝑀𝐴𝑃𝑇 haplotype to 𝐻𝑜𝑚𝑜 𝑠𝑎𝑝𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑠"
>
> "Evidence suggesting that Homo neanderthalensis contributed the H2 MAPT
> haplotype to Homo sapiens"
>
> This title is completely meaningful in plain text. The convention to style
> the names of species and haplotypes in italics is just that, a styling
> convention.
>

Would you also say there's no semantic difference between "Evidence
suggesting that Homo neanderthalensis contributed the H2 MAPT haplotype to
Homo sapiens" and EVIDENCE SUGGESTING THAT HOMO NEANDERTHALENSIS
CONTRIBUTED THE H2 MAPT HAPLOTYPE TO HOMO SAPIENS"? If so, why does unicode
allow those to be formatted differently?

I think that capitalization generally gets used to express semantic
meaning. Capitalizing the first character of a sentence is a way to
semantically mark the start of the sentence. Capitalizing Homo is a way to
express semantics. Homo gets capitalized here for the same reasons as it
gets italicized. In both cases it's because the semantics of a species name
dictate it if you follow official recommendations.
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