But the English letter "c" and the Russian letter "с" are completely different characters, even if at a glance they look the same - they make completely different sounds, and are different letters. It would be ludicrous to suggest that they should share a single symbol.
1. Unicode isn't a method of storing pixel or graphic representations of writing systems; it's meant to store text, regardless of how similar certain characters look.
2. What do you do about screen readers & the like? If it encounters something that looks like a little half-moon glyph that's in the middle of a sentence about foreign alphabets that reads "Por ejemplo, la letra 'c'", should it pronounce it as the English "see" or as Russian "ess"?
(IIRC, she learned the language entirely from books so has no idea of the correct pronunciation and thinks she's fluent)
2. I think the pronunciation should not be encoded into the text representation on a general scale. You would need different encodings for "though" and "through" in english alone. Your example leaves the meaning open, even if being read as text. If I was the editor, and the distinction was important, I'd change it to "For example, the cyrillic letter 'c'".
I understand that Unicode provides different code points for same-looking characters, mostly because of history, where these characters came from different code sheets in language-specific encodings.
I'm not sure that that is really possible without something way bigger or more complicated than Unicode. Consider the string "fart". In English that means to emit gas from the anus. In Swedish it means speed. Does that mean Unicode should have separate "f", "a", "r", and "t" for English and Swedish?
> 2. What do you do about screen readers & the like? If it encounters something that looks like a little half-moon glyph that's in the middle of a sentence about foreign alphabets that reads "Por ejemplo, la letra 'c'", should it pronounce it as the English "see" or as Russian "ess"?
What would a human do if that was in a book and they were reading it aloud for a blind friend?
It was a joke, by the way.
“Cyrillic” isn't the same everywhere. Bulgarian fonts differ from Russian fonts, some letters are “latinized”, some borrow from handwritten forms:
https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Българска_кирилица
Colored example has the third alternative for Serbian cursive.
So without some external lang metadata we don't even know how your message should look.
However, Russian “Кк” traditionally is different from Latin “Kk” in most recognized families. In the '90s, font designers regularly thrashed ad-hoc font localization attempts which ignored the legacy of pre-digital era, and blindly copied the Latin capital into capital and minuscule forms.
Or the whole eh/ye flip En/UK/Ru Eh/е/э Ye/є/е
г/е are unified and that's probably as it should be but there are downsides.