Character Identity of the Turkish Lira Sign (was: Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign)

From: Karl Pentzlin <karl-pentzlin_at_acssoft.de>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 22:50:07 +0200

Am Dienstag, 22. Mai 2012 um 04:48 schrieb Shriramana Sharma:

SS> Any reason why the glyph of the current existing character 20A4 ₤ LIRA
SS> SIGN could not have been changed instead?

Even if it is given that the design of the glyph for the Turkish Lira
sign presented ii http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4273.pdf is
derived from the traditional pound sign (U+00A3 / U+20A4), it is not
simply a glyph variant of the pound sign. The pound sign has a bow
above, and its base is essentially horizontal, swung in almost all
glyph variations. The Turkish Lira sign essentially has a vertical stem
which is terminated at the top, and a base which is upturned to the
right.
The difference between the Pound sign and the Turkish Lira sign is by
far more prominent than between the Latin capital letters U and V,
which are (correctly) separately encoded although they in fact
originated as glyph variants of the same Roman letter.

Moreover, I do not take it granted that the Turkish Lira sign is a
glyph variant of the Pound sign by design.

It is a common feature of recently designed currency symbols to be
based on a letter (or, as the Indian Rupee sign, on a blending of
letters), on which a single or (mostly) double stroke is applied.

Looking at the finalist entries on the design competition
 http://typophile.com/node/90604 , 12th entry by "serdar"
5 designs are based on a TL ligature (obviously for "Türk Lirası",
i.e. Turkish for "Turkish Lira"), and two designs are based on a L with
stroke. One of these two (middle of the lower line) simply shows a
capital Latin L with a curved stroke, the other one is the winning
entry with its original horizontal two strokes.

This leads me to the suspicion that even the winning entry is simply
a L with two horizontal strokes (thus being a glyph variant of U+2C60
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH DOUBLE BAR), with the right upturn of the
base – as you can only win such a competition if you show at least some
creativity and fanciness, rather than entering a straightforward
design like a plain with the "usual currency bar" (i.e. double bar),
in analogy to e.g. ₦ U+20A6 NAIRA SIGN (simply a Latin N with double
bar).

In fact, only the designer knows.

- Karl
Received on Wed May 23 2012 - 15:52:56 CDT

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