[vip] Loudly spoken opinions - input for today's meeting

[Cary Karp]

Quoting Francisco:

> I wonder what others think about the ideas in this document posted to the
> latin team. Apologies to Harald for putting you in the spot.

I also agree with Harald’s emphatic conclusion. There is, however, a
single case in the Latin code point repertoire where different abstract
characters at separate code points are commonly represented with the
same glyph, thus properly requiring special consideration in the VIP
study. This is:

	U+01DD	; ǝ	# LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED E
	U+0259	; ə	# LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA

Although there is no everyday writing system including the one of them
that also includes the other, since they are both PVALID it is to be
expected that some registries will also support them both. (Remember
that gTLDs rarely have any specific language nexus and serve a polyglot
registrant base.) They are, however, conceptually distinct and cannot be
treated as variants of each other in any algorithmic (or, for that
matter, linguistic) sense. To be sure, this necessitates particularly
rigorous consideration before adding either of them to a local
repertoire of supported code points. That need can be flagged in any
exhaustive tabulation of PVALID code points for the Latin script. This
would require an informational annotation, and likely some form of
narrative recommendation, but there is no stronger "variant" issue that
needs to be accommodated.

The set of counterarguments that can be typified by, "Yes, but I sure
think that 'æ' and 'ae' are confusingly similar and therefore expect
that other users would, as well", all require contextual modulation. The
'æ' is an atomic element of the Norwegian alphabet (and others) and any
suggestion that the VIP study might make of need for its canonical
equation to 'ae' would be met with a dismissive giggle at best, and
taken as sheer cultural effrontery at worst. In either case, it would
risk our output being disregarded.

/Cary