From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 09:01:36 EST
Arcane Jill scripsit:
> 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").
My father and I never could convince my mother (native German speaker
who immigrated to the U.S. at age 12) that the football (i.e. American
rugby) player she dated in high school was a "fullback" and not a
"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.
"Solidus" is probably the most interesting one: it's Latin for "shilling",
and until 1971 the usual way of writing "six shillings eightpence" was
6/8, i.e. "sex solidi octo denarii". In this use, the / descends from
U+017F, the old "long s".
"Underscore" would suggest rather U+0332, the combining low line. As
for "pilcrow", it's probably descended from a perversion of "paragraph",
but nobody knows for sure.
The most mysterious term is "caron" for the hacek accent: this word
seems to exist only in ISO standards, and nobody has any idea where it
came from.
-- John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan Original line from _The Warrior's Apprentice_ by Lois McMaster Bujold: "Only on Barrayar would pulling a loaded needler start a stampede toward one." English-to-Russian-to-English mangling thereof: "Only on Barrayar you risk to lose support instead of finding it when you threat with the charged weapon."
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