From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 05:51:56 EST
> From: Christopher John Fynn [mailto:cfynn@gmx.net]
> There is plenty of disagreement about what the "proper" name for many
> characters should be
Or, indeed, why the "proper" name for a character must be in English,
and spellable in ASCII, instead of, say, Japanese.
> From: Kenneth Whistler [mailto:kenw@sybase.com]
> And, indeed, some of us have toyed around with the notion of
> publishing an American English translation of the Unicode
> names list, including such obvious improvements as:
In fact, until Kenneth Whistler's email about American English - I
actually thought the Unicode character names /were/ in American English,
because they are certainly not in my native dialect (although I did know
that most Americans don't say "full stop"). Rest assured, Kenneth, we in
Britain do /not/ refer to slash as "solidus", underscore as "low line",
backslash as "reverse solidus", paragraph sign as "pilcrow sign", and so
on. I have no idea where these terms came from, but, take it from
someone who lives here, they are not in common usage in Britain. (With
the exceptions of "full stop" and "anticlockwise"). Curious -- I wonder
where those "official" names came from?
I've never attached any importance to the "proper" names (and I'm also a
programmer). In fact, I don't even see why a Unicode character /has/ to
have a "proper name" at all. ASCII characters never had them. And, hey -
the official names for CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A (for example)
tell me nothing more than the script and codepoint anyway. I tend to
regard them as "comments".
Jill
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