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Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

It’s a Chinese character and a Latin letter. The idea, presumably, being that of ‘multiple languages’.

But I don’t know Chinese so I don’t know that is an arbitrary Chinese character with the Latin A for contrast. I’ve seen languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet occasionally intersperse Latin letters before so until I was told just now I assumed that this Chinese character with A had some significance in Chinese.

So I don’t think it’s very effective at that.

Really? When I first saw it I understood it must have to do with changing languages.

I thought it was a weird logo or something, no idea it was even a button.

Never struck me that way, though I can see it in retrospect. On the other hand, if I see a flag, I know that’s language settings.

In don’t know that using flags for language settings is more semantic, but it’s convention so I know what it means.

I’ve seen flags used to indicate language settings for as long as I’ve been using computers.

Visiting the Netherlands right now and every time I visit local.google.com, it reverts back to Dutch. I had no idea what the symbol on its own and only figured it out when searching how to get things back to English and seeing the symbol used in that specific context.

I recall thinking it was a compass before. They should've chosen a more complicated Chinese character if that is what they wanted to portray.

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