Re: reversed Polish-hook o

From: Frédéric Grosshans <frederic.grosshans_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2015 11:28:32 +0200

I've just noticed the comment quoted in the subject in the description
of

'LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED DELTA' (U+018D)
	
and I'm intrigued how it got into the standard.

If you look in the NamesList.txt files of the various versions of the standard, you see that this annotation appeared in Unicode 4.1.0

A google search leads to the google book version of a “Phonetic Symbol Guide” (https://books.google.fr/books?id=b7ml0qh2HMcC&pg=PA318&dq=%22reversed+Polish-hook%22+o&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=LsRuVebBKcqdsgGR0IGgAQ&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22reversed%20Polish-hook%22%20o&f=false )
You should have more details on the page 129 of this book (which I cannot see)

I didn’t find the proposal leading to this inclusion in Unicode, but my guess is : “reversed Polish-hook o” is the traditional name of this symbol, when it was used by phoneticians to write what is now ðʷ or zʷ in IPA (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_and_nonstandard_symbols_in_the_International_Phonetic). According to the german wikipedia page for this symbol (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C6%8D):

„Obwohl er ursprünglich ein O mit gespiegeltem Ogonek darstellen soll, wird der Buchstabe typografisch meist als ein gedrehter Kleinbuchstabe Delta realisiert”

My rough translation :

“Even if it should initally represent a o with mirrored ogonek, the letter is most often typographically realised as a truned small letter delta”

Hope this helps.

        Frédéric
 
Received on Wed Jun 03 2015 - 04:30:02 CDT