I think I read the story about Helen Keller’s tutor, Anne Sullivan, taking her out into the garden, splashing water on one of her hands, and spelling out “water” with her fingers on the other hand in my elementary school Japanese textbook. “Everything has a name!”

Characters have names, too. Most modern computers, smartphones, consumer electronics, etc. use a character encoding called Unicode to handle characters, but in Unicode, the name of the Latin alphabet character “A” is “LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A.” Through these “names” and the “numbers (code points)” associated with names, it is possible to precisely distinguish which character is which.

Incidentally, the name for the Greek character “Α (alpha)” is “GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA,” and the name for the Cyrillic character “А (A)” is “CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A.” When characters look so similar that it’s hard to tell them apart, it’s helpful if they have names. The name for the hiragana character “あ” follows a similar pattern: “HIRAGANA LETTER A,” but of course this “A” refers to the sound “ə,” not the character “A” in the Latin alphabet.

In this series, I’d like to explore the names of characters , which are deeply intertwined with the world of font design.

Unicode Consortium Official Website

https://home.unicode.org/

(mm)