Re: FW: WIDOWS POLICES ??

From: Alain LaBonté  (alb@riq.qc.ca)
Date: Fri Oct 27 2000 - 14:32:21 EDT


À 09:56 2000-10-27 -0800, Alain LaBonté a écrit:
>À 09:36 2000-10-27 -0800, Magda Danish (Unicode) a écrit:
>>I received this email inquiry in French. I translated it to the best of my
>>knowledge but am not quite sure however what the word "Polices" stands for
>>here. My best guesses are "License" or "Policy" not to mention of course the
>>more obvious "cops" ;-)
>>I'm hoping Alain La Bonte or Patrick Andries will help clarify the correct
>>meaning.
>
>[Alain] « Une police [de caractères] » simply means "a [character] font",
>as odd as it may look. In other contexts, « police » also means « cop » in
>French. Hard to catch for English-speakers, but true.

[Alain] I should add, for the records, that the word « police » in the
sense of "cop" in French comes from Greek "politeia", which means
"political body" and the word « police » in the sense of "font" comes from
ancient provençal "polissia", which means "receipt, bill" (itself from
Greek "apodeixis", "proof").

It is the "proof of a character", a "concrete receipt of the character"
which you otherwise don't see, like the money you have given up in exchange
for a tangible proof...

Interesting, isn't it, in particular in the context of character coding?

Alain LaBonté
Québec



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