Unicode vs. Unikod

Philippe Verdy verdy_p at wanadoo.fr
Mon Apr 10 12:14:14 CDT 2017


I've seen "unicodé" or "uniencodé" used informally in various French
articles or discussions (but not in dictionnaries).
But after all Apple is also a trademark, this does not restrict people
using it for the fruit. Trademarks often reserve common words for use with
specific products or company names in some country in some registered
activities, this doesnot mean they take rights on everything or even in
every place where they were also legally registered (possibly in the same
domain of activity).

"Unicoding"  (and related verb forms without the necessary leading capital)
can legitimately be found to just refer to the UCS or the ISO 10646
standard, not just the "Unicode Consortium" and its standard(s), activities
or domain name/web site, or any derived application based on the UCS.

There's some freedom here, even if one cannot use it freely to refer to
another organization anyway the term "Unicode" is now wellknown in lots of
languages. It's also natural that people want ot rewrite it in their native
script. I just wonder why the Consortium did not document at least some
correct orthography for use in other script than Latin, even if these
alternate names are not registered. However there's no need to document
variant orthographies such as "Unikod" which may be used in some other
Latin-written language. There should be such listed terms in other scripts
with at least Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic,
Hangul, Kanas and possibly Bopomofo (I wonder if there's any way to write
it with Han sinograms by composing a radical and phonetic strokes).

Even if these terms are not "standardized" and really supported, it would
be convenient to find some external references (even if they are not fully
conforming or criticizing some existing problems), just to know what other
people are doing with the standard and how open it is really, even for
fancy uses. As this standard wants to be universal, people will naturally
challenge this openness and will want to reappropriate it partly. This is
not a defect but a consequence of the fact that this standard is vivid,
productful and can even accept some innovations and remain evolutive and
attractive.


2017-04-10 18:01 GMT+02:00 Aleksey Tulinov <aleksey.tulinov at gmail.com>:

> On 04/10/2017 12:54 PM, Janusz S. Bień wrote:
>
> > Grammatical Dictionary of Polish contains only "unicode":
> >
> > http://sgjp.pl/leksemy/#73537/unicode
> >
>
> I'm deeply impressed that dictionary contains grammar for registered
> trademarks. Google and Microsoft are also there, but not Oracle. I'm not
> confident i understand how that works.
>
> To compare to Cambridge Dictionary:
>
> http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/google?fa
> llbackFrom=british-grammar
>
> Apparently "google" is a verb as in "to google", and this is why it's in
> the dictionary, but "Microsoft" and "Unicode" are missing.
>
> > 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.
> >
>
> I believe "Юникод" in Russian is just a foreign word adopted by language,
> and it's a russism, it's a way of saying "Unicode" in Russian (phonetically
> the same). So apparently word "юникод" was adopted as a noun, similarly to
> how "google" was adopted in English as a verb.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20170410/882597ad/attachment.html>


More information about the Unicode mailing list