> Imagine if the letter Q had been left out of Unicode's Latin alphabet.
To properly write my european last name I have to press between 2 and 4 different simultaneous keys, depending on the system. Han unification is beyond misguided, but combining characters is not the problem.
Han unification as a hole is misguided? I'll grant you that some characters which were unified probably shouldn't have been, and maybe some that some that should have been weren't, but what's the argument for the whole thing to be misguided?
Should Norwegian A and English A be different Unicode code points just because Norwegian also has Ø, proving that it is a different writing system? You may want to debate whether i and ı should the same letter (they aren't), but most letters in the Turkish alphabet are the same as the letters in the English alphabet.
We'll the Turkish i/ı/I/I is I think exactly the example I would have come up with of characters that looks the same as i/I, but should have it's own code point, just like cyrillic characters have their own code points despite looking like latin characters.
Absolutely. So i/ı/I/I do have their own codepoints. But the rest of the letters, which are the same, don't. Just like han unification. Letters which are the same are the same, and those which are not are not, even if they look pretty close.
The thing is that the turkish "i" and "I" don't have their own codepoints, it is the same one as latin "i" and "I", when they should have been their own codepoints representing the same glyphs. That way going from I to ı and from i to İ wouldn't be a locale dependant problem.
When Chinese linguists came up with hanyu pinyin, they specifically wanted to pick up Latin characters (1) for Chinese phonetics, so that Chinese phonetic writing could use what we'd call "white men's writing system".
Now, they did use the letter Q for the sound tɕʰ that was formerly often romanized as "ch". It is not really a "k" as Q is in English.
Are people now saying that hanyu pinyin should use a different coding to English, because it would be more "respectable" for non-English languages to have their own code points even if the character has same roots and appearance? That is absolutely pointless. The whole idea of using Q for tɕʰ is that you can use the same letter, same coding, same symbol as in English.
(1) OK they did add ü to the mix, although that is usually only used in romanization in linguistics or textbooks, and regular pinyin just replaces it with u.
To properly write my european last name I have to press between 2 and 4 different simultaneous keys, depending on the system. Han unification is beyond misguided, but combining characters is not the problem.