RE: Bantu click letters

[Asmus Freytag]

In light of Ken's reply it's probably not worthwhile going into the details 
on all points of your answer. However there are a few points were, like 
John, I feel you and I are simply talking past each other. Let me pick just 
one item:

At 01:07 PM 6/10/2004, Michael Everson wrote:
In any case -- and I think this is the precedent I am looking for -- this 
is a "script" capital Q in the same way that U+0261 is a script g. It is 
**not** unified with U+210A SCRIPT SMALL G.

It's not a precedent, since the use of the word 'script' has different 
meaning in both cases.

No, it doesn't. Your mathematical "script" has a meaning which is 
different from the one which applies to the IPA [g] and from the one I had 
in mind when I named the character.

The early namers used the term 'script' rather indiscriminantly. For 
example they applied it to 2118 which they called SCRIPT CAPITAL P, even 
though, typographically it's a calligraphic lower case p and would have 
been better called *WEIERSTRASS ELLIPTIC FUNCTION (that is now annotated in 
the names list). Similarly, the character at 2113 so called SCRIPT SMALL L 
is now annotated as

        = mathematical symbol 'ell'
        * despite its character name, this symbol is derived from a
          special italicized version of the small letter l
since that's what it is. We've in fact had to add a separate MATHEMATICAL 
SMALL SCRIPT L since. Similarly, the letters 0251 for which the Unicode 1.0 
name was LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT A and 0261 are not 'script' forms in the 
same way as used correctly for e.g. 2130, 2131, etc. in the Letterlike 
Symbols block.

The mathematical alphanumerics are simply additional instances of 
letterlike symbols. If we can unify the historic symbol for Mark used in 
Germany with 2133, even though its shape allows less variation than that 
allowed for mathematical script fonts, we can certainly unify other uses 
that are letter-like.

Sometimes I suspect that the fact that you are not conversant with 
mathematical notation, but very familiar with linguistic notations, makes 
you treat these two as worlds apart. However, both are specialized 
technical notations, and both share the feature that if you changed the 
font on any letter sufficiently far, you would destroy the meaning.

In that way, both are different from regular 'language text' where you can 
transpose the text into different font styles, and preserve the meaning.

A./