How Prince Got the Media to Use His Custom Symbol Ƭ̵̬̊ | Hacker News Reader

How Prince Got the Media to Use His Custom Symbol Ƭ̵̬̊

fastcodesign.com

10 pointsthebent8 comments

Prince doesn't always get his due as an entrepreneur as well as a musician. This is a perfect example of how skilled and courageous he was.

Nice sentiment but reading the story I was more concerned about his mental health.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36107590 - Why did Prince change his name to a symbol?

Yeah, that's genius, not crazy.

Prince was a true genius. "Mental health" is a term used to describe those of us who are not geniuses. I've known a few (very few) true geniuses in my life, and they're all so far outside the mental mainstream that I don't see how we could judge their mental health.

Can someone more clued in to Unicode than I am explain what is going on?

Is that thing a combination of UTF-8 code points? Selecting it and searching Wikipedia brings up Prince's page, so something interesting is going on here.

If I dump the hex for the symbol I get:

   c6 ac cc b5 cc ac cc 8a

Using Python 3:

    >>> import unicodedata
    >>> s='Ƭ̵̬̊ '
    >>> list(map(unicodedata.name, s))
    ['LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH HOOK', 'COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY', 'COMBINING CARON BELOW', 'COMBINING RING ABOVE']

The first character Ƭ ('T with hook') is used in some African orthographies. The remaining letters are combining characters; they modify the letter preceding it. The 'short stroke overlay' is intended as a plain-text equivalent to the html s tag. The 'combining caron below' (more properly, a hacek) is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (a notation for transcribing the sounds of languages) to represent the voicing of an otherwise voiceless consonant (as in, d vs t or b vs p). The 'combining ring above' is used in European orthographies, such as Danish (e.g. å).

None of these symbols were intended to be used together, but the design of Unicode allows for such creative (ab)uses.

RIP

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