From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 08:23:59 EST
Thanks, that's interesting. It may well be the case that printers,
typesetters, etc., are the only people who actually /need/ these things
to have names, so I guess their names should be respected. The rest of
us just seem to get by without them, somehow. For example, U+00AC (NOT
SIGN) is something that most people I know would describe in terms like
"oh - you know - that character to the left of 'one' on a keyboard, if
you press shift". (And even then, the usual response is "Oh that one -
I've never used it. What's it for?". Curiously, to a mathematician,
tilde, overscore and prime are used in various contexts to mean "not
sign"; wheras to a programmer, exclamation mark and tilde could mean
"not sign". Do printers, typesetters, editors and publishers use U+00AC
to actually /mean/ "not sign" then, or is it an arbitrary name?
(Incidently, the code charts for U+00AC (NOT SIGN) also say "= angled
dash (in typography)." So I'm still a bit confused about in which
discipline it is actually known as "not sign").
Going back to the American English point, our terms for things are
really not so far apart. "Counterclockwise" sounds just as acceptable to
my ears as "Anticlockwise". I confess that "period" still sounds weird
to my ears, but every programmer calls that character "dot" anyway. In
short, Kenneth's "translation into American" is more understandable to
me, in Britain, than the original. Okay, so we now have an explanation -
they are typesetters' terms. (I don't know if they are British or
American, but don't think it really matters, now that we've established
that the majority of the population don't use them).
As an amusing aside, when character names migrated from programmers to
the general public via BBC television (because TV presenters started
having to read out email addresses and URIs), they purposefully started
a new trend of referring to slash (solidus) as "right-slash" or
"forward-slash". /Everyone/ else had called it "slash" for as long as I
could remember, but the BBC couldn't allow their presenters to say
"slash" because (in Britain, at least), the verb 'to slash' is a slang
term meaning 'to urinate'. Curiously, they never had the same problem
with the name of the letter P.
Jill
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Séamas Ó Brógáin [mailto:leabhair@iol.ie]
> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 12:05 PM
> To: Unicode-L
> Subject: RE: American English translation of character names
>
>
> Jill Ramonsky wrote:
>
> > . . . 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.
>
> If you were a printer, typesetter, editor or publisher---i.e. one of
> those who _use_ all these characters and therefore must have
> names for
> them---you would probably be more familiar with traditional
> terminology.
>
> Séamas Ó Brógáin
> ----------------
>
>
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