caron, wrapped in mystery

bubul, over on bulbulovo, has an hilarious entry on how his family name, which is of Hungarian origin, gets mangled by the bureaucratic and the clueless. (My favorite was a French reading of an escaped XML entity of capital Č as Č on a written form copied from some email or online form.) This bittersweet anecdote brought to mind the how and why behind Unicode calling č a Latin small letter c with caron, rather than c háček (which is what I learned in my intro phonology class).