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).
"Nobody knows", indeed. It seems the reason for the name was lost deep in the mists of time, before there was a Unicode standard and characters roamed the vast plains of Earth without a sense and without purpose...
ReplyDeleteI want to make one thing clear: I call it a háček out of respect for Jan Hus and love for our Czech brethren. Plus, I don't want to add to the confusion. If we had it our way, everyone would call ˇ by its one true name: mäkčeň.
Oh sweet Lord...
ReplyDeleteMäkčeň, eh. "Diakritické znamienko na označenie mäkkosti hlásky" according to the online Short Dictionary of the Slovak Language. Before this moment, I would never've guessed that Slovak had an a umlaut.
ReplyDeleteNtate thabiso,
ReplyDeleteI have tagged you with the Blogger Reflections Award. Thank you.