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New symbol for Indian Rupee
- lionhearted 16y agoInteresting. 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.
- nreece 16y agotime consuming to draw - 4 lines You can write it in just two strokes.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- igravious 16y agoI just tried a few times and I make it 3 strokes. Also my attempts look crummy compared to the elegant representation on that indianexpress.com website. The euro, yen, sterling and dollar are easier to get sort of right and all look more natural. I could easily just be biased due to prolonged exposure. Interestingly the Chinese yaun (Renminbi?) shares the same currency sign as the Japanese yen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A5 edit: yup, 2! Start from the top right and go left then make the r shape and then the other line across. Nice! Thx!
- GeneralMaximus 16y agoPretty easy for those used to writing in Hindi. Write a 'Ra' and a straight line across the middle.
- FraaJad 16y agoYou mean Devanagari. Hindi has no script of it's own. Few other Indian languages also use Devanagari. Eg: Sanskrit, Marathi, Konkani.
- kranner 16y ago"A few" other Indian languages...
- sid0 16y agoConflating "few" and "a few" or "little" and "a little" is a common Indian English-ism, I find. /Indian
- kranner 16y agoCorrect, 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.
- FraaJad 16y agoYou are right. By the time I saw your comment, the "edit" link had disappeared.
- jacobolus 16y agoHe 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”.
- ugh 16y agoThat 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).
- sgrove 16y agoI 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!
- charliepark 16y agoThat'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.
- niyazpk 16y agoYou 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-shocking-story/ http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/07/13/rupee-symbol-shockin...
- Retric 16y agoYea, other than #4 they all look like they would take a while to draw correctly.
- balac 16y agoI can't believe the rupee didn't have a symbol, and I can't believe I never noticed!
- bluesmoon 16y agoWe'd use Re for singular (ie, Re. 1) and Rs for plural (Rs. 2000)
- prog 16y agoOr INR in some cases.
- mallipeddi 16y agoINR is not a symbol. It's the ISO currency code for Indian Rupee.
- listic 16y agoFYI, the Russian ruble didn't have a symbol, too, until recently. http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/159/ http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/159/ Though most currencies have.
- stereo 16y agoMany 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_SIGN.svg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U%2B20B0_GERMAN_PENNY... . We didn't even get the ¢ symbol in exchange.
- eru 16y agoI 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.
- revorad 16y agoWhy does it need a second horizontal line cutting across?
- tesseract 16y agoTo distinguish from 'ra': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Consonants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Consonants
- revorad 16y agoI guess so, but it would be easier to just use a dot or more natural just to use the Ru (in devanagari script).
- jey 16y agoAs a Tamilian, I feel obligated to be offended by your suggestion. How about http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/bf9/index.htm 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.
- bluesmoon 16y agoIf 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.
- psychotik 16y agoSo how do they about getting a unicode code-point for this, and the keyboard mapping etc, for something like this?
- fhars 16y agoThey 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.
- nailer 16y agoI'd go with B as you say, because per the article Nepal and Pakistan use the existing symbol for their own currencies.
- compay 16y agoIt 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.
- joubert 16y agoCool. Btw, I like how the South African rand is simply a Latin "R".
- _ivan 16y agoReally hacking news :)
- khandelwal 16y agoI 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.
- Setsuna 16y ago>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.
- known 16y agoWill it be embedded in keyboard by default?
- mortenjorck 16y agoI 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.
- timcederman 16y agoI thought 円 was equivalent to 'dollar', while ¥ was its currency symbol, equivalent to '$'.
- thisduck 16y agoAnyone see any resemblances to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_and_hammer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_and_hammer ? Not that I mind at all.
- hernan7 16y agoFor some reason this brings back memories of the "austral", the Argentinian currency from the eighties. Had its own symbol and everything - too bad it wasn't available in any computer or typewriter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso#Austral.2C_1985.E2.80.931991 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso#Austral.2C_1985.... I think only newspapers had the means to print that symbol non-lamely. For the rest of us, it was capital "A", backspace, equal sign. That was on a typewriter, of course. Don't remember which hack we used when trying to write the symbol on a text processor. Later on, the zeroes started piling up again (hyperinflation will do that to your currency) and they went back to the "peso" with the more sensible "$" sign. Found an image of the symbol: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Argentine_austral http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Argentine_austral
- eru 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_(typography)), which has it's own history (and can be typed).