What matters is questions like "will these different forms ever
appear in the same document with distinct meanings, in the absence
of clear contextual distinctions (e.g. different languages)?".
How can you detect "clear contextual distinctions" without
semantics and interpretation?
You can't. But it is not the job of the character set to supply the
semantics and interpretation. Analogously, the first words of these
two sentences:
Polish the silver before you go.
Polish is the only language he speaks.
are spelled identically (in English), and the meanings can be sorted out
only by semantics and interpretation, which are *not* supplied by the
spelling. It is nevertheless extremely rare for the two words to be
confused, and no significant problems arise from the identical spelling.
Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
henry(_at_)zoo(_dot_)toronto(_dot_)edu utzoo!henry