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. :-(
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
