Hello, 2003-12-18T18:38:28Z Michael Everson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 16:21 +0100 2003-12-18, Philippe Verdy wrote: >>John Cowan wrote: >>> 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. >> >>I think it may have occured in some typographic terminology, because >>the intial glyph looked more like a crochet hook than to a reversed >>circumflex, i.e. caron was not angular in handwritten form, as it is >>now in typesetted fonts, but looked like a rounded and oblique check >>mark (a slight variation of the accute accent with a small rounded >>hook on its bottom end, but still much more distinctful from the >>lower half-circle form used by breve). > This doesn't make any sense to me, but in any case it does not > explain the origin of the word "caron". The most plausible suggestion > I've ever come up with is folk-etymological: It's a CARet that sits > ON the vowel. :-( The first time I saw the word caron it reminded me of the Russian word «корона» (korona, cf. crown, coronet, or Corona beer). The accent obviously looks like a small crown, hence may be the name. I guess we could find the mysterious word in one of the languages using haceks. Native speakers are needed. -- Alexander Savenkov http://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
