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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/14/2025 10:47 AM, Phil Smith III
via Unicode wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:012d01dc6d2a$105656a0$310303e0$@akphs.com">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#0A2F41">Well,
I’m sorta “asking for a friend” – a coworker who is deep in
the weeds of working with something Unicode-related. I’m
blaming him for having told me that :)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#0A2F41"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<br>
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<p>This actually deserves a deeper answer, or a more "bird's-eye"
one, if you want. Read to the end.</p>
<p>The way you asked the question seems to hint that in your minds
you and your friend conflate the concept of "combining" mark and
"diacritic". That would not be surprising if you are mainly
familiar with European scripts and languages, because in that
case, this equivalence kind of applies.</p>
<p>And you may also be thinking mainly of languages and their
orthographies, and not of notations, phonetic or otherwise, that
give rise to unusual combinations. Most European languages do have
a reasonably small, fixed set of letters with diacritics in their
orthographies, even though there are many languages where, if you
ask the native users to list all the combinations, they will fall
short. Example is the use of an accent with the letter 'e' in some
of the Scandinavian languages to distinguish two identically
spelled small words that have very different functions in the
syntax. You will see that accent used in books and formal writing,
but I doubt people bother when writing a text message.</p>
<p>The focus on code space is a red herring to a degree. The real
difficulty would be in cataloging all of the rare combinations,
and get all fonts to be aware of them. It is much easier to encode
the diacritic as a combining character and have general rules for
layout. With modern fonts, you can, in principle, get acceptable
display even for unexpected combinations without the effort of
first cataloging, then publishing and then having all font vendors
explicitly adding an implementation for that combination before it
can be used.</p>
<p>Other languages and scripts have combinatorics as part of their
DNA, so to speak. Their structural unit is not the letter (with or
without decorations) but the syllable, which is naturally combined
from components that graphically attach to each other or even fuse
into a combined shape. Because that process is not random, it's
easier to encode these structural elements (some of which are
combining characters) than to try to enumerate the possible
combinations. It doesn't hurt that the components nicely map onto
discrete keys on the respective keyboards.</p>
<p>Notations, such as scientific notation, also often assigns a
discrete identity to the combining mark. A dot above can be the
first derivative with respect to time, which can be applied to any
letter designating a variable, which can be, at the minimum any
letter from the Latin or Greek alphabets, but why stop there.
There's nothing in the notation itself that would enjoin a
scientist from combining that dot with any character they find
suitable. The only sensible solution is encoding a combining mark,
even though some letters exist that have a dot above as part of an
orthography and are also encoded in precomposed form.</p>
<p>In contrast, Chinese ideographs, while visually composed of
identifiable elements, are treated by their users as units and
well before Unicode came along there was an established approach
how to manage things like keyboard entry while encoding these as
precomposed entities and not as their building blocks.</p>
<p>A big part of the encoding decision is always to do what makes
sense for the writing system or notation (and the script it is
based on).</p>
<p>For a universal encoding, such as Unicode, there simply isn't a
"one-size-fits-all" solution that would work. But if you look at
this universal encoding only from a very narrow perspective of the
orthographies that you are most familiar with, then,
understandably, you might feel that anything that isn't directly
required (from your point of view) is an unnecessary complication.</p>
<p>However, once you adopt a more universal perspective, it's much
easier to not rat-hole on some seeming inconsistencies, because
you can always discover how certain decisions relate to the
specific requirements for one or more writing systems.
Importantly, this often includes requirements based on de-facto
implementations for these systems before the advent of Unicode.
Being universal, Unicode needed to be designed to allow easy
conversion from all existing data sets. And for European scripts,
the business community and the librarians had competing systems,
one with limited sets of precomposed characters and one with
combining marks for diacritics. The ultimate source of the duality
stems from there, but the two communities had different goals. One
wanted to efficiently handle the common case (primarily mapping
all the modern national typewriters into character encoding) while
the other was interested in a full representation of anything that
could be present in printed book titles (for cataloging),
including unusual or historic combinations.</p>
<p>In conclusion, the question isn't a bad one, but the real answer
is that complexity is very much part of human writing, and when
you design (and extend) a universal character encoding, you will
need to be able to represent that full degree of complexity.
Therefore, what seem like obvious simplifications really aren't
feasible, unless you give up on attempting to be universal.</p>
<p>A./</p>
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