Re: Accents
From: | John Cowan <jcowan@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, January 8, 2002, 20:32 |
Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> My theory is that this use of the # sign is derived from the L B BAR
> SYMBOL at U-2114, or a script version of it.
That appears to be the case.
> Older Danish cookbooks
> (and my grandmother's handwritten recipes) use a symbol for a pound
> that looks like a script lowercase u with the right tail going back
> across the legs --- that would be an intermediate stage.
>
> BTW, John, would that be a candidate for encoding in Unicode? It
> doesn't really look like either a NUMBER SIGN or an L B BAR SYMBOL.
No, but it sounds like a glyph variant nonetheless. After all,
script capital Q looks more like "2" than "Q", but a "Q" it is.
> I don't know how the symbol came to be used for a number sign, though.
> Perhaps the current shape is really a merger of two different signs.
Nor do I, and possibly so.
--
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