[omega] Re: Seeking for a new name for "sign"

[regidor at hiroshima-u.ac.jp]

Sorry, the previous mail had some encoding problems. I think now it's fixed.


--- Xavier Cazin <xavier at oreilly.com> wrote:
> I would suggest "facies". It brings "face" of course, but also "shape" 
> and "properties" notions. I thought of facet first, but the XML Schema 
> use of it limited it more or less to the constraint aspect.

A problem of this word is that it is difficult to translate to other languages. For example, the translation to Spanish of "type face" is "tipo de letra". In Spanish there is the word "faz", but it means "surface" and also "human face", it's not related to typography. You can "translate" (transliterating?) it not trying to translate the meaning, only the form or pronunciation, something like "facis", a completely new word. But I prefer an ethymologically derived term like texteme (textema), texon (tex&#243;n), textatom (text&#225;tomo), etc. It also can be translated to non-Indoeuropean languages: 書素 (maybe).

--- Arthur Reutenauer <Arthur.Reutenauer at ens.fr> wrote:
>   I came across this idea, too, and found out it was already used in
> linguistics, as Yannis mentioned. It should be no problem to give this
> word a new meaning, in my opinion, since our concerns are quite distinct
> from those of the linguists (so both meanings wouldn't be likely to
> interact), but if it should not be accepted, I also thought we could use
> the suffix -on to form not only texton, which Antonio already mentioned,
> but, maybe, graphon. While writing this mail, I suddenly thought of
> unicodon, too, but that may be awkward, since it relates too much too the
> code, and thus character identity of the sign, and not too much too its
> glyph.

I prefer texon instead of texton. "Text&#243;n" in Spanish means "big text", also it sounds like "tost&#243;n", boring text :) Anyway, "texon" also has the problem that it seems related to TeX, and we want a general term.

"Graphon" suggests only graphical information, like glyphs. I thought about "lexon", but this one has the same problem, it suggests only meaning, not shape. How about "grapholex"? (I don't like it too much, but...)

"Unicodon" is too similar to "Unicode".

Best regards,


Antonio