Re: Why not just change the glyph of 20A8 RUPEE SIGN?

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Jul 28 2010 - 16:38:21 CDT

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    "Alex Plantema" <alex.plantema@xs4all.nl> wrote:
    > Other countries have a currency named rupee as well. They keep using 20A8.

    And this is exactly what the Indian governement wants to avoid: a
    confusion about which currency 20A8 represents. They want a unique
    character that will ONLY be interpreted as the INDIAN Rupee. And for
    that purpose, they designed a unique glyph, which should also have a
    unique encoding, forbidding any glyph variations that could represent
    another non-Indian rupee.

    This is important for pricing purposes, notably now with frequent
    cross-border trading, and list-pricing.

    It's true that in India itself, there are also several other Rupee
    signs (depending on the script), but this is certinaly causing
    confusion on India, because some of them are also shared by other
    nearby countries, with which India has very frequent trades, or simply
    in shops with cross-border visitors.

    May be India will decide that the official public list-pricings (in
    street shops/markets, or online) should ONLY use the new symbol, or on
    payment check forms, excluding all other symbols (except possibly the
    international ISO 639 symbol INR) for legal trading.

    It's curious that India did not even decide to rename its currency at
    the same time, to give it an even more unique identity.

    (That's what the European Union decided, to avoid the confusion with
    the previous multiple "basket currencies", like "ECU", adopting
    instead the term "Euro" which was never used in any past currency, but
    also because there still remains some "basket currencies", sometimes
    named "ECU" in private currency trading platforms, and which are not
    officially quoted but computed as weighted indexes between the Euro
    and other EU currencies which are still not in the EMU; note that even
    the ECB and the EU Commission defines such European currency index for
    statistical purposes only).

    Philippe.



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