RE: American English translation of character names

[Arcane Jill]

Thanks, that's interesting. It may well be the case that printers, typesetters, etc., are the only people who actually need these things to have names, so I guess their names should be respected. The rest of us just seem to get by without them, somehow. For example, U+00AC (NOT SIGN) is something that most people I know would describe in terms like "oh - you know - that character to the left of 'one' on a keyboard, if you press shift". (And even then, the usual response is "Oh that one - I've never used it. What's it for?". Curiously, to a mathematician, tilde, overscore and prime are used in various contexts to mean "not sign"; wheras to a programmer, exclamation mark and tilde could mean "not sign". Do printers, typesetters, editors and publishers use U+00AC to actually mean "not sign" then, or is it an arbitrary name? (Incidently, the code charts for U+00AC (NOT SIGN) also say "= angled dash (in typography)." So I'm still a bit confused about in which discipline it is actually known as "not sign").

Going back to the American English point, our terms for things are really not so far apart. "Counterclockwise" sounds just as acceptable to my ears as "Anticlockwise". I confess that  "period" still sounds weird to my ears, but every programmer calls that character "dot" anyway. In short, Kenneth's "translation into American" is more understandable to me, in Britain, than the original. Okay, so we now have an explanation - they are typesetters' terms. (I don't know if they are British or American, but don't think it really matters, now that we've established that the majority of the population don't use them).

As an amusing aside, when character names migrated from programmers to the general public via BBC television (because TV presenters started having to read out email addresses and URIs), they purposefully started a new trend of referring to slash (solidus) as "right-slash" or "forward-slash". Everyone else had called it "slash" for as long as I could remember, but the BBC couldn't allow their presenters to say "slash" because (in Britain, at least), the verb 'to slash' is a slang term meaning 'to urinate'. Curiously, they never had the same problem with the name of the letter P.

Jill


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Séamas Ó Brógáin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 12:05 PM
> To: Unicode-L
> Subject: RE: American English translation of character names
>
>
> Jill Ramonsky wrote:
>
> > . . . I have no idea where these terms came from, but, take it from
> > someone who lives here, they are not in common usage in Britain.
>
> If you were a printer, typesetter, editor or publisher---i.e. one of
> those who _use_ all these characters and therefore must have
> names for
> them---you would probably be more familiar with traditional
> terminology.
>
> Séamas Ó Brógáin
> ----------------
>
>