John Hudson wrote:
> > >(In French, sans serif is normally named "antique"....
> > Which must be very confusing to Germans and others who use
> 'antiqua' to
> > distinguish seriffed humanists types from blackletter.
Antoine Leca replied:
> And you do believe that Frenchies are _not_ confused by the fact that
> Germans and others have misused the French word? ;-)
<OT self-consolatory meditations>
I think that terminology is one of the biggest challenges for anyone wishing
to approach Unicode.
"Unicoders" should have a decent understanding of at least three core
disciplines, highly unrelated to each other: computer science, typography,
and linguistics.
They should have a firm understanding of the English terminology for these
disciplines and, if their mother tongue is not English, they should also
know the corresponding terminology in their own languages (admitting that
there *is* a corresponding terminology in their languages!).
Moreover, Unicoders should have at least a vague knowledge of the
corresponding terms in as many other languages as possible, in order to be
able to spot "false friends" unwillingly used in discussions by other
non-English-speakers.
In addition to that, a standard that summarizes the whole written tradition
of the world necessarily attracts concepts and terms from virtually any
field of knowledge, name it mathematics (e.g. 2244 "NOT ASYMPTOTICALLY EQUAL
TO"), music (e.g. 1D1CD "MUSICAL SYMBOL TEMPUS IMPERFECTUM CUM PROLATIONE
IMPERFECTA DIMINUTION-2"), medicine (e.g. 211E "PRESCRIPTION TAKE"),
religion (e.g. 2638 "WHEEL OF DHARMA"), games (e.g. 2658 "WHITE CHESS
KNIGHT"), etc.
With all that I really don't envy people who, like Patrick Andries, have
undertaken the "impossible" task of translating the Unicode documentation
into another language, and I look with sympathy at their requests for
proof-reading...
</OT>
Ciao.
Marco
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