My previous comment was a mental experiment for something that I found super interesting; it just kind of leaked out without much, um, thinking. It was definitely not my intention to suggest that Ricci's choice did not influence what is in the language today, not least because this is all new to me (the wrong choice of "historically" probably made things worse).

In any case, thank you very much for taking the time to explain, particularly the part about characters with no meanings!

Edit: typo!