On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Jukka K. Korpela <[email protected]> wrote: > Though such efforts can be useful, and I was somewhat involved in the work, > I think the basic idea is questionable. The Unicode names of characters are > not “names of characters” in an ordinary sense. Instead, they are > alphanumeric identifiers for characters, with considerable mnemonic nature, > but still ids, not really names. The list of Unicode names should not even > be treated as a list of English names of characters; many of the names are > unsuitable for common use (or even any use except as identifiers), or at > least suboptimal for use.
Every Unicode character has an id of the form U+xxxxxx. Having some sort of readable name beyond raw number is useful for many audiences. > It may be useful to try to agree on official or semi-official names for > characters in a language. Such a list hardly needs to cover all of the over > 100,000 Unicode characters. Why not? Why should an English speaker sticking a arbitrary character into a character map program get a name for it but a non-English speaker not? (I'll note that of those 100,000 characters, 75,000 Han ideographs don't have names and 11,000 Hangul syllables have algorithmically derived names. > So Unicode names should not be translated at all, any more than you > translate General Category values for example. Why wouldn't you? There's an argument that they're generally useful for programmers only and programming often requires English knowledge, but if I were explaining the character categories in Esperanto, I would certainly say that Sm is matematikaj simboloj or Simbolo Matematika, not act like "Symbol, Math" should have any importance to my audience. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
