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I got a new computer at work which has Windows XP as its OS. I discovered today that the character map which comes with this version of Windows is larger and arranged differently than the character map on Win versions I have used (the one I'm using now at home is Win98). Also, it has a label if you set the cursor on a letter or symbol which tells you what it is. By going over the letters and characters, I found some rather interesting names, some of which I've never heard of.
/ is called solidus. (I've always called it slash, maybe forward slash to distinguish it from
\ reverse solidus. (Backslash to me.)
{} curly brackets, as opposed to
[] square brackets
«» left- and right-pointing double quotation marks (also comes in a single version)
¶ pilcrow
Ðð Latin eth
Þþ Latin thorn
ß Latin small sharp s (in my German class, we called it es-zet). often taken as B by those who don't know German
; Greek question mark (yes, that's right -- in Greek the semicolon is used as question mark)
There are several which I can't replicate here because my version doesn't have them.
the caron is an upside down circumflex written over a letter
the ogonek is a small mark like L with no serifs which I take it is written under a letter, sort of like the Greek subscripts (don't know what language use this)
the schwa and the euro sign are represented; I don't have them
the eng, a letter which looks like a script n with the right stroke extended down like a j. Not sure what this is used for.
the dotless i is used, I believe, in Turkish.
Finally, I note that ñ is called n with tilde, which is silly. In Spanish, it's a separate letter called eñe, just as ll is called elle and is also considered a separate letter. I'm surprised the map doesn't have ll by itself.
The new map has the entire Greek alphabet; the entire Cyrillic alphabet including special versions of some letters used, for instance, only in Ukrainian etc; the entire Hebrew alphabet and the entire Arabic alphabet.
Which brings me to a question which I'm sure some of you can answer: how do you get a computer to write right to left if you want to write in Hebrew or Arabic? Or here's another question I would be glad to be enlightened on: how do computers write in Chinese or Japanese or other pictographic systems?
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Joined: Jan 2004
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I discovered today that the character map which comes with this version of Windows is larger and arranged differently than the character map on Win versions I have used (the one I'm using now at home is Win98).It's called Unicode, and it's a great and wonderful attempt to provide character mappings for most of the world's languages. There's a website for further information: http://www.unicode.org/Ðð Latin ethAlso called edh. It's basically a barred d. Still used in Icelandic and Faroese. the caron is an upside down circumflex written over a letterAlso called a haček in Czech. the ogonek is a small markI always thought it looked like the comma-like part of the cedilla ç ... It usually represents nasalization of a vowel in Polish, sort of like the tilde in Portuguese. how do you get a computer to write right to left if you want to write in Hebrew or Arabic? Or here's another question I would be glad to be enlightened on: how do computers write in Chinese or Japanese or other pictographic systems?Well, how can the computer write left to write? It's the same thing, except you switch the directions. Actually, it's now part of the OS, and you have to set things up to work that way. (You can use both directions in a single sentence or paragraph, and it gets kind of confusing.) Sino-Japanese characters are just like other glyphs in character mappings. If you mean how can you type them, there's a bunch of different entry methods: e.g., when I was learning Mandarin Chinese and typing up flashcards for study, I used the Pinyin system which is a phonemic system using Roman letters. There are others that are stroke based. If you look in your control panels, there's a Keyboard control panel that has an Input Locale tab. You can add different keyboard configurations for different languages and different entry methods, etc. You might have to load different fonts, keyboards, etc, to get things working, but most modern OSes have support for a great many of the world's languages. Hope this helps.
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