Robin Laing wrote: > From what I can remember is, why does an international character look > like an english character under internationalization? "Because it does". Take, for example the Greek or Cyrillic (Russian) alphabets. ( http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/greek/index.asp and http://www.friends-partners.org/oldfriends/language/russian-alphabet.html ) Note that the Roman alphabet in which I'm writing historically has strong links to the Greek alphabet. Note that St. Cyril based his alphabet on the Greek he knew for use among the Slavs. So the Roman letters look like the Greek ones, not the other way around. So is a capital Greek Alpha (Î) a different letter to the Roman A? Historically, the answer is "yes", not least because a capital Greek Rho (Î) is phonetically equivalent to a Roman R, not a Roman P. There has always been a strong presumption that they are different letters and should, for example, be sorted separately. The Unicode forum have been having huge amounts of fun, as far as I can tell, trying to define "a letter" in all the world's writing systems. It's not straightforward. James. -- James Wilkinson | The rats knew that if they didn't keep the moon nailed Exeter Devon UK | down, somebody was bound to make off with it. E-mail address: james | -- http://metalandmagic.com/Pages/Galleries/ @westexe.demon.co.uk | Anthro/nailmoon.html
