Re: Character name translations

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> Though such efforts can be useful, and I was somewhat involved in the work,
> I think the basic idea is questionable. The Unicode names of characters are
> not “names of characters” in an ordinary sense. Instead, they are
> alphanumeric identifiers for characters, with considerable mnemonic nature,
> but still ids, not really names. The list of Unicode names should not even
> be treated as a list of English names of characters; many of the names are
> unsuitable for common use (or even any use except as identifiers), or at
> least suboptimal for use.

Every Unicode character has an id of the form U+xxxxxx. Having some
sort of readable name beyond raw number is useful for many audiences.

> It may be useful to try to agree on official or semi-official names for
> characters in a language. Such a list hardly needs to cover all of the over
> 100,000 Unicode characters.

Why not? Why should an English speaker sticking a arbitrary character
into a character map program get a name for it but a non-English
speaker not?

(I'll note that of those 100,000 characters, 75,000 Han ideographs
don't have names and 11,000 Hangul syllables have algorithmically
derived names.

> So Unicode names should not be translated at all, any more than you
> translate General Category values for example.

Why wouldn't you? There's an argument that they're generally useful
for programmers only and programming often requires English knowledge,
but if I were explaining the character categories in Esperanto, I
would certainly say that Sm is matematikaj simboloj or Simbolo
Matematika, not act like "Symbol, Math" should have any importance to
my audience.

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.