[Tutor] close, but no cigar

[Marc Tompkins]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 7:46 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>wrote:

> This is not quite as silly as saying that an English E, a German E and a
> French E should be considered three distinct characters, but (in my
> opinion) not far off it.
>

I half-agree, half-disagree.  It's true that the letter "E" is used
more-or-less the same in English, French, and German; after all, they all
use what's called the "Latin" alphabet, albeit with local variations.  On
the other hand, the Cyrillic alphabet contains several letters that are
visually identical to their Latin equivalents, but used quite differently -
so it's quite appropriate that they're considered different letters, and
even a different alphabet.
I don't know enough about the similarities and differences between various
East Asian languages to know whether, say, Chinese and Korean are more like
English and German or more like English and Russian - but that, rather than
the visual similarity, would be my criterion for deciding.

Spot the differences:

A  А    a  а
B  В    b  в
C  С    c  с
E  Е    e  е
Ë  Ё    ë  ё
K  К    k  к
M  М   m м
           n  п
O  О    o  о
P  Р    p  р
T  Т     t   т
          u  и
X  Х     x  х
Y  У    y  у

A few notes:
-  this won't look right unless your email client is Unicode-capable
-  no, I'm not saying that these letters are equivalent - some (T and Т, K
and К) basically are, others (E and Е, n and п) definitely are not - I'm
just saying that they are visually similar if not identical
-  just HOW similar they are depends on which typeface you use.
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