that the word "caron" is a portmanteau for "caret" (a inverted v shaped editorial symbol used to indicate an ommission) and "macron" (a diacritic mark shaped like a horizontal line that is placed over a letter), the name suggesting the (inverted) shape of the caret and the above-letter positioning of the macr on (suggested by James Naughton in October 2001).( aside to editor) Just change them all to "WITH CARON" and let's move on.Ī couple of the more serious etymologies that have been proposed for the word "caron" are :
#CARET SHAPED LETTER ISO#
Dismissed, Corporal.Īnd seven years later Unicode guru Ken Whistler suggested that the following little dialogue at an ISO committee meeting may be closer to the truth:ĭelegate from Slovakia: You can't spell "WITH HACEK" that way - it has a hacek on the C.Ĭonvenor from Switzerland: Well, we can only use ASCII A-Z in character names.ĭelegate from Slovakia: Well, it's spelled wrong, and that isn't acceptable to us.Ĭonvenor from Switzerland ( with a straight face): In Swiss French we call it a "caron", and there wouldn't be any trouble spelling that.Ĭonvenor from Switzerland: Yes, so let's just use that term instead. Carry - ahem - on.Ĭorporal Dolt (saluting): Very well, sir. General Frump (eyes glazed): Carry - ahem - on, Corporal. But as you know, sir, there simply is no other term, and I thought, perhaps. General Frump: Thank you for your report on the enemy code, Corporal, is there anything else? I'm quite busy.Ĭorporal Dolt: Well, sir, there's the matter of the "hacek", which some thought might be confused with "hatchet", sir. Everyone and their baby fur seal is suffering from walking pneumonia and dysentary. Scene: The tiny cramped office of General Frump, commander of an obscure military base somewhere north of the 89th parallel. How These Things Get Started, Chapter Two In 2001 Unicode Vice President Rick McGowan wrote a short tongue-in-cheek screenplay explaining how the term might have come into being : The question of the caron has time and time again vexed the Unicode and Unicore mailing lists, but thusfar no-one has been able to pin down when the term was coined or what the etymology of the term is. Until the recent popularisation of Unicode, the term caron seems to have been virtually unknown outside of character encoding standards, and has no obvious etymology or source, whereas the Czech name háček (diminutive form of hák "hook") was and still is a widely-used name for this mark (it is also less-commonly referred to as a wedge, inverted circumflex or inverted caret). The Holy Grail for historians of character encoding is to discover why the háček ( ˇ)-a diacritical mark which looks like an inverted circumflex-is called a caron in character encoding standards such as Unicode. Sunday, 16 August 2009 Antedating the Caron
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