Some kind of unicode copy/paste hijinx, probably coming from a PDF somewhere.
They seem to be different Unicode codepoints: FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER
I wonder, is that really something that should go into a character set?
It was needed for JIS compatibility, since they encode halfwidth and fullwidth versions of kana and English characters, because having different fonts for them was too expensive.
oh, sorry, has to due with the way windows switches between chinese and english. Sometimes it goes into a weird mode monospaced mode for some reason. Thought that would get stripped