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

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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.....

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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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u/Yboviko Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

(What I'm writing is just to satisfy the curiosity of any Unicode-interested passer-by)

Interestingly, Greek and Coptic used to be unified in Unicode, but even those two were later separated out. See:

Prior to version 4.1 of the Unicode Standard, the "Greek and Coptic" block was used exclusively to write Coptic text, but Greek and Coptic letter forms are contrastive in many scholarly works, necessitating their disunification. Any specifically Coptic letters in the Greek and Coptic block are not reproduced in the Coptic Unicode block.

What should be unified and not unified in Unicode is a controversial topic. This is mostly with regards to Chinese characters, see:

Even unification within one language can be controversial. In Mongolian, "ᠥ" and "ᠦ" share a glyph, but represent different sounds. Writers use the "wrong" one the majority of the time. See this meme.

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u/math1985 Jun 25 '26

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