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
