Is it just me or too filters in modern search engines do not show any discussions on the background of 1488 becoming a unicode for symbol א, aleph? Someone must have tried to dig this story up.
But all I see is a single post on Medium:
https://medium.com/@wimahl/unicodes-nazi-problem-58fbd4291a7f
@alter_kaker personally, I was more impressed with Aleph. Any number in the 1XXX range corresponds to a year with some terrible events—it's just the sad truth of history.
But the first letter of Hebrew being 1488—there should be some funny trolling behind it, right? What is the probability of such a coincidence?
@naphtali Numerology vs neonazi symbolism?
* 22 Hebrew letters [1]
* Becker published 'unicode88' in 1988 [2]
* 1991 Hebrew in Unicode1.0.0: 52 slots; aleph was already x05D0=1488 [3]
* 2006 v5.0.0: 87 slots [4]
* Mark E. Shoulson proposal: +yod triangle [6]
* 2018 v11.0.0: 88 slots [5]
* proposals/debates [6]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20161125224409/https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf
[3] p132 https://web.archive.org/web/20130309014150/http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/CodeCharts1.pdf
[4] pdf-p45 https://web.archive.org/web/20070930181219/http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.0.0/charts/CodeCharts.pdf
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20180704030222/https://www.unicode.org/Public/11.0.0/charts/CodeCharts.pdf
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_%28Unicode_block%29
@naphtali
Many of the discussions are likely to be well archived and many of the people involved are likely to be alive and easy to interview.
A posteriori arguments as coincidences:
* The count of 88 has only been in place for about 7 out of about 37 years; why did white supremacists wait so long?
* 1488 is a multiple of 16, so is natural to start a sequence;
A posteriori arguments as deliberate:
* with 7 blocks of 16 for Hebrew in v1.0.0, why wasn't aleph... started at x0590 or x05A0? [3]
The ordering that puts Arabic alif as x0627=1575 does look a bit like it could have been done in a tidier way [7].
But Juan de Ovando's best known action in 1575, per the Wikipedias, seems to have been his death [8]. If there are solid [[WP:RS]]es, then the relevance of his final acts for the history of racism should be added to a relevant Wikipedia page, maybe [9].
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_%28Unicode_block%29
naphtali
Yeshaya
Boud
Michael Fessler
פְּרִי
Max Iorsh
Yehuda T. Deutsch