> > Note that as of 1993, the only "LAMDA" or "LAMBDA" characters > > in the standard were: > > > > 039B;GREEK CAPITAL LETTER LAMDA;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;GREEK CAPITAL LETTER > > LAMBDA;;;03BB; > > 03BB;GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;GREEK SMALL LETTER > > LAMBDA;;039B;;039B > > 019B;LATIN SMALL LETTER LAMBDA WITH STROKE;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN SMALL > > LETTER BARRED LAMBDA;;;; > > > > So why was 019B spelled differently than the other two, originally?
019B wasn't spelled differently than the other two, *originally* -- if by originally, you are speaking of the Unicode Standard. All three were spelled "LAMBDA" in Unicode 1.0. 039B/03BB were changed to "LAMDA" as part of the synchronization with 10646-1 in 1993. And those changes were motivated by the pre-existing names in ISO 8859-7, as I mentioned before, as well as by preferences expressed by the Greek National Body. 019B is not a *Greek* character, but a Latin letter from Americanist phonetic usage. It came from Unicode 1.0 only -- it wasn't part of the separate 10646-1 repertoire that was merged. And the Greek National Body had no opinion or preferences for it. As nobody expressed a requirement that its name be respelled in 1993, it wasn't respelled, and stayed LAMBDA, as it was in Unicode 1.0. The rest of the name change for it, changing "BARRED" to "WITH STROKE" was part of a separate mandate regarding changes of characters with "BARRED" in their names, and wasn't something specific to this character. I expect that even this explanation will not satisfy those who think that oddities like this should not exist in character names. But that is just the nature of the historical development of big standards like the Unicode Standard when you have to deal with very many opinions expressed by very many parties and develop consensus in standards committees. You inevitably end up with historical oddities. --Ken
