Re: help with an unknown character

Hi Gerrit -

being NO logician myself - modern logic seems to be a rather new science related to 19323/33 continental European printing.

1) At what time did the "backslash" made its appearance then?

Wikipedia has this: "Bob Bemer introduced the "\" character into ASCII[3] on September 18, 1961,[4] as the result of character frequency studies. In particular the \ was introduced so that the ALGOL boolean operators ∧ (AND) and ∨ (OR) could be composed in ASCII as "/\" and "\/" respectively.[4][5] Both these operators were included in early versions of the C programming language supplied with Unix V6, Unix V7 and more currently BSD 2.11."

2) What about U+2129 TURNED GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA then? To me it looks like an erratic character encoded for backward compatibility only - LETTERLIKE SYMBOLS is not the block I would/did look for logical symbols. Why is U+2129 encoded this way - what's it's history? Is it reaching back to the 1930s - what was it used for and in what context? The glyph on the book title could be meant to symbolize U+2129 only - the printer just had to help himself with what his character set was like…

Any idea?
HE

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On Jan 11, 2013, at 11:12 PM, Gerrit Ansmann <gansmann_at_uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> On Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:51:04 +0100, Elbrecht <sirfonts_at_mac.com> wrote:
>
>> that's just my first guess - no blackslash available the printer replaced with what was available in his set…
>
> I would be really surprised, if this was the glyph closest to a backslash available. I am no expert on classical typesetting, but given the size of what’s printed here, I would guess, it should be easy to use some makeshift construction, to arrange an ‹I›, ‹–›, ‹—› or a decorative element diagonally. And even if not: Why was there a letter in the typesetter’s set, that nobody here can identify?
>
> Also, considering once more that this is a cover: Does this have to be a premanufactured movable letter? And does this have to be the result of classical moveable type at all?
>
>
> On Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:51:04 +0100, Elbrecht <sirfonts_at_mac.com> wrote:
>
>> But NEGATION would do the job in a Koan manner!
>
> As already said, I suspect that the weird character itself is the koan, and not anything it might stand for.

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名 非 〇
我 我 我
法 法 法
〇 是 即
Received on Tue Jan 15 2013 - 15:17:58 CST