caron

[Joel S. Berson]

At 5/11/2009 02:13 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>... Yet it is
> > the term used without discussion for this diacritic in as authoritative and
> > influential a source as The Unicode Standard (1991, 2000).
> > ...
>
>Hmph! And when I got it from the Unicode Standard, I thought it was just a
>standard term I'd somehow overlooked. I think I'll revert to calling it
>"hacek", with or without the ... self-referred whozis on the "c".

As I wrote previously, "caron" was also the term
used in 1985 and earlier (1985 is draft 2) in ISO
8859.2, "Latin Alphabet 2", whose "field of
application" says it is intended for applications
in "Albanian, Czecj [sic, but I only have a copy
of the draft, not the final approved standard
:-)], German, Macedinian [sic], Polish, Rumanian,
Serbo-croatian, Slovak and Slovene."   One code
point (11/07) is specifically called "caron";
letters with that diacritic are named (e.g.)
"capital/small letter L with caron".

I don't remember where (someplace Googling or
Wikipediaing, I assume) I found "stresica" in
2004.  From a brief Googling today:

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/SLOVENIA/2004-06/1086897565
claims that "The terms carot and caron are
derived from computer terminolgy from Windows and
DOS and indicate the same charachters [sic] as
the circumflex and stresica respectively."

http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/th/read/SLOVENIA/2004-06/1086995866
claims "Stresica, Hacek or Makcen (Slovene,
Czech, Slovak) all refer to the (v) symbol above
a letter and indicate a specific pronunciation."

(These two web pages also claim that Slovenian
dictionaries mistranslate "stresica" into English
as "circumflex", which is, one might say, upside-down.)

Wikipedia (article "caron") says:

"Usage differs as to the name of this diacritic.
In the field of typography, the term "caron"
seems to be more popular. In linguistics, the
tendency is to use hác(ek." [I apologize for the loss of the caron.]
"The term caron is used in the official names of
Unicode characters (e.g., "Latin capital letter Z
with caron"). Its earliest known use was in
computing references in the mid-1980s.[1] Its
actual origin remains obscure, but some have
suggested that it may derive from a fusion of
caret and macron. Though this may be folk
etymology, it is plausible, particularly in the absence of other suggestions."

[1] is a link to http://www.unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#14:
-----
Q: Why is the hacek accent called "caron" in Unicode?

A: Nobody knows.

Legend has it that the term was first spotted in
one of the 'giant books' from the '30s at
Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, NY;
but no one has been able to confirm that.

More accurate reports trace the term back to the
mid '80s where we do have documented sightings of
"caron" in publications such as:

     *  The TypEncyclopedia by Frank Romano,
ISBN: 0-835-21925-9, Libraries Unlimited; 1984
       p. 6 shows the mark with the notation "caron/hacek/clicka"
[The preceding is earlier than my ISO 8859.2
second draft, but might be antedated by its appearance in a first draft. JSB]
     *  IBM's Green Book which has an original
copyright date of 1986.  "Caron Accent" appears
on p. K-432, in a table entitled "Diacritic Mark Special Graphic Characters."
       National Language Support Reference
Manual. 4th ed. 1994. (National Language Design Guide, 2)
     * SGML & Adobe documentation in this 1986
reference [a link to
http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/training/Entities/ISOdia.html,
which seems to be taken from ISO 8879:1986 (the
year appearing here means it is the approved standard), "Diacritical Marks".]

Unicode and ISO 8859-x just carried the tradition along.

In an article published in 2001: "Orthographic
diacritics and multilingual computing",  J.C.
Wells — a linguist at the University College in London — writes:
"The term ‘caron’, however, is wrapped in
mystery. Incredibly, it seems to appear in no
current dictionary of English, not even the OED."

Whoever the originator is, we suspect that he has
probably taken his secret to the grave by now. [Various authors]
-----
[Hopefully not -- 1984 is only 25 years ago, and
traditionally the geeks in computer software were young.  :-)]

I disclaim any knowledge of these languages, or
direct knowledge of the true origin of "caron",
but I do know something about character codes
sets and the ISO standardization process.

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org