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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
€ 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.
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.
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 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.
