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
@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
Boud