Julian, > > 028A is ʊ LATIN SMALL LETTER UPSILON > > 028B is ʋ LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH HOOK > > > > These are used for different sounds. I'm not sure that either name is > particularly bizarre. > > I know what they *mean*. > The name "V WITH HOOK" is strange because there is no hook in ʋ, in > any of the several other senses that HOOK is used in IPA character > names, or in any reasonable typographic sense. ...
Basically, everything you need to know can be culled from the relevant UnicodeData.txt entries: 01B2;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V WITH HOOK;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT V;;;028B; 028B;LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH HOOK;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT V;;01B2;;01B2 These two characters *were* called script v in Unicode 1.0. Somebody who was pulling together repertoire for the initial CD's and DIS for 10646-1 back in 1990 had culled the capital letter from lists of African alphabets and called it "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V WITH HOOK", presumably because it was hooky-looky, and because of all the other African letters with hooks. Part of the grand bargain involved in getting Unicode 1.0 and 10646 fused into one virtual standard was that Unicode gave up the Unicode 1.0 character names where there was a difference, and instead used the character names that were in the draft for 10646. Some of the names of lowercase IPA characters got affected by that decision. It could just as well ended up LATIN SMALL LETTER HOOKY-LOOKY V-LIKE THINGIE. At this point people need to get over name prescriptivism and realize that some of these decades-old name decisions just happened, as it were. Better to simply marvel at the weird oddities to be found when poking around in dusty character name closets at this point. U+028B LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH HOOK still gets the job done to represent the IPA voiced labiodental approximant symbol. ;-) --Ken
