Unicode vs. Unikod

[Janusz S. Bień]

This is a long overdue issue, but better late than never.

To make a long story short, I think that the word "Unikod" should not
be used in the Polish translation of "What is Unicode":

http://www.unicode.org/standard/translations/polish.html

The word "Unikod", to the best of my knowledge, has been coined long
ago by Piotr Trzcionkowski, who registered also the domain
www.unikod.pl used to advocate Unicode in Poland.

"Unicode" as a trademark should not be translated, for me this is
quite obvious.

This is actually the case in almost all language versions of "What is
Unicode" using the Latin script (with the exception of Esperanto and
Lithuanian, where it can be probably justified by some grammar rules,
and Polish). This is also seems to be the case in various language
versions of Wikipedia (I've checked only some of them) with the
exception of the Polish one which uses "Unikod" as the primary entry.

The occurence of "Unikod" on the Unicode site may be interpreted as an
official acceptance of this equivalent. I hope this is not the case.  I
would like to clarify the matter before engaging myself in a
discussion about introducing the "Unicode" primary entry in Polish
Wikipedia.

You can check the usage of "Unicode" and "Unikod" in Polish not only
with Google but also in the National Corpus of Polish:

http://nkjp.pl/

There are 786 occurences of "Unicode" coming mainly from published
books and 102 occurences of "Unikod", mainly in Usenet postings and
Wikipedia discussions.

Grammatical Dictionary of Polish contains only "unicode":

http://sgjp.pl/leksemy/#73537/unicode

Polish versions of Windows use "Unicode". A localization dictionary

http://www.btinfodictionary.com/

also preserves "Unicode".

Actually I don't mind using "Unikod" (or better "unikod") informally,
as e.g. spelling "Unikodem" is simpler than "Unicode'em" (instrumental
singular) and "Unikodzie" looks better in Polish than "Unicodzie"
(locative singular), moreover there is no doubt how to pronounce it.
This is probably the reason why, to my surprise, the word was
introduced also in some other Slavonic languages, e.g.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Unikod.

My point is only that both "What is Unicode" and Polish Wikipedia
primary entry should use the original spelling.

Best regards

Janusz

-- 
                           ,   
Prof. dr hab. Janusz S. Bien -  Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej)
Prof. Janusz S. Bien - University of Warsaw (Formal Linguistics Department)
jsbien at uw.edu.pl, jsbien at mimuw.edu.pl, http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/