From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Sep 29 2007 - 10:23:21 CDT
> De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] De la
> part de Andrew West
> Envoyé : samedi 29 septembre 2007 15:30
> À : Unicode Mailing List
> Objet : Re: Fish (was Re: Marks)
>
> On 28/09/2007, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > While I'm surprised that it hasn't been proposed before, it's clear that
> > it's so far out of the realm of character encoding that it can be safely
> > considered an April Fool's joke.
>
> Yes, in my opinion encoding the ichthys symbol would be as unthinkable
> as encoding religious swastika symbols.
A swastika is already encoded! See the recent ongoing work from the Japanese
JIS standard body, that request more work being done to merge his approved
repertoire of characters with the UCS instead of using a temporary and non
interoperable mapping to PUAs: it clearly states that this mapping exists
and is usable, for example to symbolize temples in Japan on traffic
indicator systems, and in information texts broadcasted on TV...
OK, this swastika has a mirrored direction, but it is really an accepted
religious symbol, just like the much more innocent simple fish that has been
used since about a couple of millenniums (and even probably before the birth
of the Catholic Church or before Jesus-Christ).
Given the interpretation of the Fish as a symbol of the Salvior or the
Messiah, it may eventually be found within older Hebraic texts or in texts
with other Semitic origins in the pre-Christian era. Now the way the symbol
is reused today with a different controversial meaning by a few modern
American churches should not be an argument for not encoding it.
If we took this argument, then we would need to ban the letter S because it
could be used to form the controversial acronym SS, and we would no longer
be able to write correctly any language based on the Latin script. The
existence of a controversial use of some character should not be used to
hide the existence of other innocent uses.
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