<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>On 12/14/25 5:44 PM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:e16081af-bea3-4e4f-ba96-316d3ce6a1ef@ix.netcom.com">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/14/2025 10:47 AM, Phil Smith
III via Unicode wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:012d01dc6d2a$105656a0$310303e0$@akphs.com">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="Generator"
content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered medium)">
<style>@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;}@font-face
{font-family:Calibri;
panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;}@font-face
{font-family:Aptos;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif;}a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;}span.EmailStyle18
{mso-style-type:personal-reply;
font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;
color:#0A2F41;}.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;}div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}</style>
<div class="WordSection1">
<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>
</div>
</blockquote>
<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>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes. This is crucial. You (Phil) are writing like "sheez, so
there's e and there's e-with-an-acute, we might as well just treat
them like separate letters." And that maybe makes sense for
languages where "combining characters" are maybe two or three
diacritics that can live on five or six letters. Maybe it does
make sense to consider those combinations as distinct letters
(indeed, some of the languages in question do just that.) But
some combining characters are more rightly perceived as things
separate from the letters which are written in the same space (and
have historically always been considered so). The most obvious
examples would be Hebrew and Arabic vowel-points. Does it really
make sense to consider בְ and בֶ and בְּ and all the other
combinatorics as separate distinct things, when they clearly
contain separate units, each of which has its own consistent
character? Throw in the Hebrew "accents" (cantillation marks) and
you're talking an enormous combinatorial explosion at the *cost*
of simplicity and consistency, not improving it. Ditto Indic
vowel-marks and a jillion other abjads and abugidas. If anything,
there's a better case to be made that the precomposed letters were
maybe a wrong move.</p>
<p>(TL;DR: what Asmus said.)</p>
<p>~mark</p>
</body>
</html>