Alex Shinn scripsit:

> That's the exception.  It's much more common for a relation to
> exist between the two cases, such as elements x of a set X,
> or the elements a_i_j of a matrix A, etc.

A relationship, yes.  But not an identity.  Case is sometimes purely
typographical, as in the capitalized word at the beginning of the
chapter in lots of books.  But sometimes it's semantic, possibly
just by coincidence, as in polish/Polish, but sometimes expressing
a relationship, like German Sie (you, polite) vs. sie (they) or
Recht (legal right) vs. recht (correct).  In mathematics it's
always semantic, never typographical.

> But if you decide they should _not_ have case mappings, then
> you're treating them strictly as symbols, and giving them case
> properties is inconsistent.  It should be one or the other.

They are something like symbols, but they are letter-like in other ways.
Per contra, the circled Latin letters are considered symbols (and so
have no case) but have case mappings just the same.

In Unicode, things are always more complicated than you think.  Some of
that complication is added by Unicode (the circled Latin letters have case
mappings, but the more recent squared Latin letters do not), but a great
deal of it is because the *world* is more complicated than you think.
"Do I contradict myself?  Very well, I contradict myself.  I am large,
I contain multitudes."  --Walt Whitman

--
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        xxxxxx@ccil.org
They tried to pierce your heart with a Morgul-knife that remains in
the wound.  If they had succeeded, you would become a wraith under the
domination of the Dark Lord.         --Gandalf