Unicode Semantics: the โ in Turn A Gundam
This article discusses a semantics issue of a Unicode character.
Yesterday, i sent 6 hours researching a song: Yoko Kanno - Moon. It's a song from a Japanese animation titled โ Gundam, which is read as โTurn A Gundamโ.

However, on Wikipedia they used the Unicode char โ (U+2200; FOR ALL), not โฑฏ (U+2C6F; LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TURNED A).
So, i spend a total perhaps 30 min on this issue, researching on the issue of which of the two Unicode character is more proper.
On this particular issue, there's several aspects to consider. First of all, if the official publication has ever explicitly indicated about the matter, then that's resolved, but, if not, then there are these points to consider:
Does the story carry any sense of โFor Allโ in any way? As in โFor All Gundamโ? If so, then the math symbol should be used.
Otherwise, it's possible that there is no such connection whatsoever, and all there is that the series's poster used a upside down A. Maybe the artist isn't thinking about upside down A at all, maybe they were just drawing a stylized V that happened to have a stroke across it. Maybe it is meant to imply Victory Gundam, or something. In this case, when the series's title is put to print, the char should be the Unicode โฑฏ (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TURNED A) and not the logic โfor allโ symbol โ. (Note: the For All symbol is never rendered with serif. The upside-down A has serif when rendered with serif font. The V in the artwork is clearly serifed.)
Yes, a petty detail, not really important. However, it's important in the same sense that some artist care about every detail of her work. Not all artists or designers are like that, and such meticulousness doesn't necessarily contribute to greatness of a work. However, for some artist, every detail matters. That's me.
If you are designing a computer language, or even programing, the above applies too. Some programer or lang designer care about every detail. Here, the issue is proper semantics of Unicode characters. For this topic, i've written a few essays. See:
- HTML Entities, Ampersand, Unicode, Semantics
- Syntax Semantics Design: Use of Unicode Ellipsis Symbol vs Dot Dot Dot
- Syntax Design: Use of Unicode Matching Brackets as Specialized Delimiters
2012-01-05 Maiko Kinzel Engelke [2012-01-05 https://twitter.com/ssj4maiko ] told me that the upside-down A should be the math For All symbol, because โthe Turn A Gundam is something like the Last Gundam, the one where all technology would be united in one.โ. Also confirmed in a comment i posted to Wikipedia discussion, by Benjamin Howard Lee (aka MythSearchertalk) of Hong Kong 2012-01-02, quote: ยซWell, the motif of Turn A Gundam is to include and conclude all Gundam series, thus it is taking the โFor allโ meaning of Turn A.ยป Thanks guys.
Unicode, Encoding, Escape Sequence, Issues
- Unicode Symbol for โe.g.โ (exempli gratia)
- Semantics and Symbols: Examples of Unicode Symbols Usage
- Semantic of Symbol: Unicode Ellipsis Symbol vs Dot Dot Dot
- Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages; ASCII Jam vs Unicode
- Programing Language Design: String Syntax
- Syntax Design: Use of Unicode Matching Brackets as Specialized Delimiters
- Unicode Semantics: the โ in Turn A Gundam
- URL Percent Encoding and Unicode
- URL Percent Encoding and Ampersand Char
- Semantic of Symbols: HTML Entities, Ampersand, Unicode