Arcane Jill scripsit: > In fact, until Kenneth Whistler's email about American English - I > actually thought the Unicode character names /were/ in American English, > because they are certainly not in my native dialect (although I did know > that most Americans don't say "full stop").
My father and I never could convince my mother (native German speaker who immigrated to the U.S. at age 12) that the football (i.e. American rugby) player she dated in high school was a "fullback" and not a "full stop". > Rest assured, Kenneth, we in > Britain do /not/ refer to slash as "solidus", underscore as "low line", > backslash as "reverse solidus", paragraph sign as "pilcrow sign", and so > on. "Solidus" is probably the most interesting one: it's Latin for "shilling", and until 1971 the usual way of writing "six shillings eightpence" was 6/8, i.e. "sex solidi octo denarii". In this use, the / descends from U+017F, the old "long s". "Underscore" would suggest rather U+0332, the combining low line. As for "pilcrow", it's probably descended from a perversion of "paragraph", but nobody knows for sure. 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. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan Original line from _The Warrior's Apprentice_ by Lois McMaster Bujold: "Only on Barrayar would pulling a loaded needler start a stampede toward one." English-to-Russian-to-English mangling thereof: "Only on Barrayar you risk to lose support instead of finding it when you threat with the charged weapon."
