Thank you for offering a clear and actionable framing, Tapani. Let's bring it for group discussion for sure. From my side, I commit to expanding my tool to allow us to look at what that table would look like. I'd do it right now, but I need some rest before the call... On March 25, 2026 4:56:20 AM GMT-03:00, Tapani Tarvainen via Gnso-latin-diacritics <gnso-latin-diacritics@icann.org> wrote:
Dear all,
I would like to simplify the issue a little, skip all the difficult cases and consider just these two competing definitions of diacritical character (simplified here):
(1) Unicode-decomposable (2) LATIN SMALL LETTER ... WITH
* Both are well-defined and objective, they could be mechanically derived from Unicode tables.
* Both make it unambiguous what is the matching ASCII letter. There is no need to evaluate confusability in any subjective way.
* Eligibility change would be equally simple to do mechanically in either case: character name is no harder to get from Unicode tables than decomposability is.
* Both are stable in the sense that they're unlikely to change in future Unicode versions (apart from possible new additions). Although I think the former is actually more likely to change (that is, Unicode could specify a decomposition for a character that doesn't have it now), that's unlikely enough not to matter.
* The latter includes more letters and supports more languages. In that sense it would also be fairer.
* The latter is more closely aligned with linguistics.
* The latter is easier to understand to non-specialists.
* The former is what we currently have and we'd save ourselves some time and work by sticking with it.
Am I missing something important?
Having read Mark's scoping exercise, I agree that including all similarly confusable characters like ŋ or æ would be more difficult and require extra work, so leaving them for later makes sense.
But it's not a binary choice, narrowest possible or widest possible, and I think option (2) above would be a good compromise.
-- Tapani Tarvainen _______________________________________________ Gnso-latin-diacritics mailing list -- gnso-latin-diacritics@icann.org To unsubscribe send an email to gnso-latin-diacritics-leave@icann.org
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