New symbol for Indian Rupee | Hacker News Reader

New symbol for Indian Rupee

indianexpress.com

74 pointsniyazpk49 comments

That's interesting. I saw the contest they were having a week or two back, and don't remember this as one of the entries. I'm not calling shenanigans or anything, but I am curious about it. Of course, I could have just seen it and forgotten it, as I have the memory of a goldfish. Also, I have the memory of a goldfish.

You are correct. After close scrutiny they shortlisted 5 designs. Later someone high up (in the government) did not like it and so they selected an entirely new design for the symbol. Personally I do like this new one other than the 5 shortlisted ones.

Her you can see the others: http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/07/13/rupee-symbol-shockin...

Yea, other than #4 they all look like they would take a while to draw correctly.

So how do they about getting a unicode code-point for this, and the keyboard mapping etc, for something like this?

They could either repurpose the old U+20A8 RUPEE SIGN or (less stupid) try to get one of the unallocated Slots U+20B6 to U+20CF following the allocated currency signs.

I'd go with B as you say, because per the article Nepal and Pakistan use the existing symbol for their own currencies.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out - the spec for Unicode 6.0 is due in September, theoretically giving them time to add it before the release.

I wonder if this will catch on faster domestically or internationally. I'm thinking of the curious divide in Japan between the domestic use of the 円 kanji for Yen and the international ¥ symbol.

I thought 円 was equivalent to 'dollar', while ¥ was its currency symbol, equivalent to '$'.

For some reason this brings back memories of the "austral", the Argentinian currency from the eighties. Had its own symbol and everything - too bad it wasn't available in any computer or typewriter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso#Austral.2C_1985....

I think only newspapers had the means to print that symbol non-lamely. For the rest of us, it was capital "A", backspace, equal sign. That was on a typewriter, of course. Don't remember which hack we used when trying to write the symbol on a text processor.

Later on, the zeroes started piling up again (hyperinflation will do that to your currency) and they went back to the "peso" with the more sensible "$" sign.

Found an image of the symbol:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Argentine_austral

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_austral also has a symbol and more information.

Absolute Astronomy seems to be a mirror of Wikipedia.

And of course there's also the "Universal Currency Sign" ¤ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_(typography)), which has it's own history (and can be typed).

Why does it need a second horizontal line cutting across?

To distinguish from 'ra': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Consonants

I guess so, but it would be easier to just use a dot or more natural just to use the Ru (in devanagari script).

As a Tamilian, I feel obligated to be offended by your suggestion. How about http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/bf9/index.htm instead ? :)

The problem is that your suggestion would be interpreted as Hindi-favoritism, when India actually has many languages and scripts.

You're not "Tamilian", you're Tamil.

Both "Tamilian" and "Tamil" are valid nouns for a Tamil person, but "Tamil" is more often used as an adjective or to refer to the Tamil language.

If it didn't, it would just be the devanagari character र (Ra), which would be incorrect since in devanagari, the currently used symbol for the Rupee is रु (Ru). Now the reason they don't use the current devanagari symbol is because that's not representative of the entire country since there are many official languages, and few of them use the devanagari script.

Ha! So they come up with a symbol which is basically a distorted version of the devanagari one.

Well, really any decision is going to leave them open to criticism like this. Given that Hindi has more speakers in India than any other language, and is not the only language that uses Devanagari I think it's a pretty defensible choice.

The two horizontal lines and the whitespace in the middle signify the tricolours of the Indian flag. http://business.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/jul/15/slide-show...

to get = symbol, which stands for equality (among people, religion,etc)

€ and £ both (can) have two lines, the $ sign can have two lines, too. The two lines seem to me to be a allusion to that. (That’s why the € sign has two lines, anyway.)

Interesting. Looks very pretty but also time consuming to draw - 4 lines and not particularly easy transitions between them. I'll hazard a guess that people will naturally evolve a stripped down version of it for common usage.

time consuming to draw - 4 lines

You can write it in just two strokes.

Pretty easy for those used to writing in Hindi. Write a 'Ra' and a straight line across the middle.

You mean Devanagari. Hindi has no script of it's own. Few other Indian languages also use Devanagari. Eg: Sanskrit, Marathi, Konkani.

"A few" other Indian languages...

Conflating "few" and "a few" or "little" and "a little" is a common Indian English-ism, I find.

/Indian

Correct, articles are dropped and sometimes arbitrarily added; at least the 'the' is.

I wouldn't mind normally, but in the case of 'few' vs 'a few' it can be genuinely confusing because there is a drastic change of meaning.

You are right. By the time I saw your comment, the "edit" link had disappeared.

He likely means Hindi. It would be perfectly reasonable to say, e.g., “Pretty easy for those used to writing in English to write a $ symbol”.

That got me thinking: what would be the English equivalent? Latin alphabet? I’ve never heard anybody say that (outside of contexts were writing systems were explicitly discussed).

I often say "the Roman alphabet", which seems a bit odd. I suppose it's because I most frequently started talking about it in Japanese/Korean, where it's called "Roman letters".

A bit of googling says that it can be called both Roman and Latin.

Yay for trivia!

Romanji

Latin Alphabet and Arabic Numerals.

You mean Hindu Numerals[1]. The Arabs just passed on the Positional Notations on to the Europeans. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_sy...

I can't believe the rupee didn't have a symbol, and I can't believe I never noticed!

We'd use Re for singular (ie, Re. 1) and Rs for plural (Rs. 2000)

Or INR in some cases.

INR is not a symbol. It's the ISO currency code for Indian Rupee.

FYI, the Russian ruble didn't have a symbol, too, until recently.

http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/159/

Though most currencies have.

Many currencies don't. I think governments started noticing when the € symbol became common.

We lost the pretty italian ₤ sign (two stripes, compare to the pound sign £) when we switched to the euro. I also miss the german pfennig sign, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U%2B20B0_GERMAN_PENNY... . We didn't even get the ¢ symbol in exchange.

I never encountered the Pfennig sign in Germany--it must have been out of fashion for at least a few decades. We always seemed to use DM and Pf.

Cool. Btw, I like how the South African rand is simply a Latin "R".

Will it be embedded in keyboard by default?

I can't help but think that surely there's better problems to solve. I don't get what's wrong with either INR or Rs - neither of which require a new keyboard.

>I can't help but think that surely there's better problems to solve.

This argument comes up every time the government introduces something new.

Anyone see any resemblances to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_and_hammer ?

Not that I mind at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com