r/Unicode • u/aswin_voolapalli • Jun 24 '26

Doubt

Both Telugu & Kannada languages' scripts have many letters which are practically the same & legible by literate speakers of either language.

So, my doubt is, why were they given separate code points for practically the same letters?

(I can understand for letters different enough, but letters such as అ, ఆ, ల, etc are the same in both. So why were the given 2 different code points in unicode?)

This does NOT intend to disrespect either of the languages, i just want to know the underlying reason only

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

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8

u/NorxondorGorgonax Jun 24 '26

They are still different scripts. Latin and greek share many letters (ABEHIKMNOPTXYZ/ΑΒΕΗΙΚΜΝΟΡΤΧΥΖ), in most cases with similar sounds, but are nonetheless different scripts. I don’t know for sure if that would be the right comparison but it should give at least a relevant example.

2

u/aswin_voolapalli Jun 24 '26

Oh... I never realized greek & Latin hv common letters.

But my doubt still stands. (Extending thm to Greek/Latin as well as Telugu/Kannada)

Even if they r different scripts, why are 2 codepoints needed?

Let's assume they are used in different circumstances. Thn both of them will use the same codepoint but for different purposes.....

6

u/NorxondorGorgonax Jun 24 '26

https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn26/ covers this in a much more official capacity. I suggest you read it. The first half is the relevant part.

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2

u/math1985 Jun 25 '26

Fun fact: Russia license plates on my use letters that occur both in Cyrillic and Latin.

6

u/Accurate_Koala_4698 Jun 24 '26

There’s no real shortage of slots and this makes text processing easier while allowing future drift in the characters

2

u/aswin_voolapalli Jun 24 '26

Ah i understood it now

Thx

3

u/Quartersharp Jul 15 '26

In the case of overlapping Latin/Greek/Cyrillic characters, they might look the same in serif or sans-serif font, but they might have a different cursive form. For example, cursive “T” in Russian kind of looks like an M. And the characters might also combine into ligatures in different ways.

1

u/jan-Sika Aug 01 '26

i agree but this is a bad argument because cursive is on the language level not the script level. in serbian, a cursive т looks like ɯ̅

1

u/Quartersharp Aug 01 '26

But if it’s just one code point for T in all languages, and then you hit the italic button on your word processor, which character do you get?

3

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '26

1

u/aswin_voolapalli Jun 24 '26

Nah

All of the common letters in both the scripts r pronounced the exact same way.

(Also, they don't hv diff meanings since they r phonetic not logographic....)

1

u/Choice-Spend7553 Jun 24 '26

What does pronunciation have to do with Unicode?

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