There was an academic proposal in the '90's for something called "multicode" (IIRC) that did exactly this: every character had a language associated with it, so there were as many encodings for "a" as there were languages that used "a", and all of them were different, or at least every character was somehow tagged so the language it "came from" was somehow identifiable.
Fortunately, it never caught on.
The notion that some particular squiggle "belongs" to one culture or language is kind of quaint in a globalized world. We should all be able to use the same "a", and not insist that we have our own national or cultural "a".
The position becomes more absurd when you consider how many versions of some languages there are. Do Australians, South Africans and Scots all get their own "a" for their various versions of English? What about historical documents? Do Elizabethan poets need their own character set? Medieval chroniclers?
Building identity politics into character sets is a bad idea. Unifying as much as practically possible is a good idea. Every solution is going to have some downsides, some of them extremely ugly, but surely solutions that tend toward homogenization and denationalization are to be preferred over ones that enable nationalists and cultural isolationists.
> Building identity politics into character sets is a bad idea. Unifying as much as practically possible is a good idea. Every solution is going to have some downsides, some of them extremely ugly, but surely solutions that tend toward homogenization and denationalization are to be preferred over ones that enable nationalists and cultural isolationists.
glib white supremacists are the best kind of white supremacists. "it's progress!"
Fortunately, it never caught on.
The notion that some particular squiggle "belongs" to one culture or language is kind of quaint in a globalized world. We should all be able to use the same "a", and not insist that we have our own national or cultural "a".
The position becomes more absurd when you consider how many versions of some languages there are. Do Australians, South Africans and Scots all get their own "a" for their various versions of English? What about historical documents? Do Elizabethan poets need their own character set? Medieval chroniclers?
Building identity politics into character sets is a bad idea. Unifying as much as practically possible is a good idea. Every solution is going to have some downsides, some of them extremely ugly, but surely solutions that tend toward homogenization and denationalization are to be preferred over ones that enable nationalists and cultural isolationists.