Unicode name questions

[Jacob Hallen]

In article <Xns91F325AA52316RASXnewsDFE1 at 130.133.1.4>,
Philip Swartzleonard  <starx at pacbell.net> wrote:
>Martin v. Loewis || Wed 17 Apr 2002 01:25:23a:
>
>> Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> writes:
>> 
>>> "Lambda" has been spelled with a "b" as long as I can remember.  
>> 
>> I think the Unicode charts use an ASCII transcription of the native
>> pronouncation of the letters, if possible. In any case, the Unicode
>> names for the characters are "official" in the context of Unicode.
>> The Unicode consortium refrains from renaming them. Between Unicode
>> 2.0 and Unicode 3.2, no character was renamed.
>> 
>> [Etc Etc Greekness]
>
>Hm. I was browing through some of their code charts for the heck of it, 
>and I noticed that they listed certain kata/hiragana characters's primary 
>names as SI, TI, TU, etc. I've listened to a considerable amount of 
>japanese media, and AFAICT the correct romanization of those sounds would 
>be SHI, CHI, TSU, etc.

Correct from who's point of view? Every language has its own transcriptions
of foreign scripts, and quite often several. In Sweden we have 2 major ways
of transcribing Cyrillic, and several minor ones.

You can be sure that a lot of effort has gone into making politically
acceptable compromises concerning the naming of every code in the Unicode
chart. Some are probably still the subject of contention. This is the
focus of very strong feelings among a lot of people in fields outside
the Computer Science one. Unless a person wants to create an artifical
load for burning time, that person should stay well clear of these issues
and accept what the standardisation people have arrived at as immovable
truths.

Jacob Hallén

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