Manish Goregaokar's Let's Stop Ascribing Meaning to Code Points starts out with this:

I've seen misconceptions about Unicode crop up regularly in posts discussing it. One very common misconception I've seen is that code points have cross-language intrinsic meaning.

He goes on to explain the ways that this is dangerous and how tangled this area of Unicode is. I knew little bits of this already, but apparently combining characters are only the tip of the iceberg.

(via, and see also.)