Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
But Hebrew has 27 letters. Five appear in 2 forms which are recognized
both by the users and by Unicode as distinct.
Taken literally this would mean 32 forms altogether. A better statement of the situation is that Hebrew has 22 letters. Five of them appear in 2 forms and these separate forms are recognized both by the users and by Unicode as distinct.
The classical Roman alphabet had 23 letters.
But the version of what is commonly called the Latin alphabet used for Unicode names has 26 letters.
The modern Latin alphabet as normally used for English has 26 letters. All of them appear in 2 forms which are recognized both by the users and by Unicode as distinct. In this there is more difference between normal modern Latin writing and the classical Roman writing systems.
However traditional Uncial style scripts lack the case distinction. Would that be a reason to disunify those Uncial scripts from scripts that have case, including disunification from modern scripts like American Uncial?
That the modern Latin alphabets in various forms are expansions of the classical Roman alphabet is not a valid argument to consider them separate.
In Hebrew only six letters of the twenty-two have variant forms, forms used mostly as positional variants. These were coded separately partly from legacy practice rather than rendering these forms by context and using ZWJ to force retention of a non-final form at the end of a word as is done with the Arabic script.
The use of long-s versus short-s Latin scripts is comparable, though it has generally fallen out of practice, except in traditional use of Uncial and Black letter scripts and so forth and in except reproduction of older typography.
Similarly _v_ and _u_ were for long only used as positional variants.
Jim Allan
