Path: csiph.com!eeepc.pasdenom.info!news.pasdenom.info!news.dougwise.org!goblin3!goblin.stu.neva.ru!exi-transit.telstra.net!pit-in1.telstra.net!news.telstra.net!newsfeeds.ihug.co.nz!lust.ihug.co.nz!ihug.co.nz!not-for-mail From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Followup-To: comp.lang.java.programmer Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2011 12:54:06 +1300 Organization: Geek Central Lines: 22 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 118-92-86-70.dsl.dyn.ihug.co.nz Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit X-Trace: lust.ihug.co.nz 1296863647 2014 118.92.86.70 (4 Feb 2011 23:54:07 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@ihug.co.nz NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2011 23:54:07 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: KNode/4.4.7 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:25944 In message , Roedy Green wrote: > I get a strange pleasure out of poking around the odd corners of the > Unicode glyphs ... You’re not the only one. :) > ... just admiring the art of various cultures in designing their > alphabets, often baffled which they would design so many letters > almost identical. There seem to be an awful lot of cases of adapting a letter from one alphabet for a completely different purpose in another. Look at the correspondences between Cyrillic and Roman, just for example: V → B, S → C, that kind of thing. > The glyphs that fascinate me most are Arabic which look to have rules of > typography that boggle the western mind. And Arabic script was adopted by a whole lot of different languages which had sounds that Arabic did not. So they had to make up their own letters, most commonly by adding different numbers of dots to the existing shapes.