--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> i18n@... wrote:

> > How about reforms in Japan that led to the elimination of certain

kana

> > from accepted use - those syllables were replaced with others or
> > eliminated in the spoken language, as I understand it. I have

some old

> > pre-war grade school texts I have shown to more modern folks and

they

> > were puzzled by some of it.
>
> Then you must misunderstand it.

There are a lot of references to /we/ and /wi/ being abolished or
ceasing to be used - e.g.
http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/katakana13.html. Ceasing to be used
may be more accurate - a bit like Thai kho khuat and kho khon.
They've got Unicode encodings, so one can easily write text saying
they aren't used.

Richard.