
How Prince Got the Media to Use His Custom Symbol Ƭ̵̬̊ - thebent
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3059340/asides/how-prince-got-the-media-to-use-his-custom-symbol
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beat
Prince doesn't always get his due as an entrepreneur as well as a musician.
This is a _perfect_ example of how skilled and courageous he was.

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golemotron
Nice sentiment but reading the story I was more concerned about his mental
health.

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ljf
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36107590](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36107590)
\- Why did Prince change his name to a symbol?

~~~
beat
Yeah, that's genius, not crazy.

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PhantomGremlin
Can someone more clued in to Unicode than I am explain what is going on?

Is that thing a combination of UTF-8 code points? Selecting it and searching
Wikipedia brings up Prince's page, so something interesting is going on here.

If I dump the hex for the symbol I get:

    
    
       c6 ac cc b5 cc ac cc 8a

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boological
Using Python 3:

    
    
        >>> import unicodedata
        >>> s='Ƭ̵̬̊ '
        >>> list(map(unicodedata.name, s))
        ['LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH HOOK', 'COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY', 'COMBINING CARON BELOW', 'COMBINING RING ABOVE']
    

The first character Ƭ ('T with hook') is used in some African orthographies.
The remaining letters are combining characters; they modify the letter
preceding it. The 'short stroke overlay' is intended as a plain-text
equivalent to the html s tag. The 'combining caron below' (more properly, a
hacek) is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (a notation for
transcribing the sounds of languages) to represent the voicing of an otherwise
voiceless consonant (as in, d vs t or b vs p). The 'combining ring above' is
used in European orthographies, such as Danish (e.g. å).

None of these symbols were intended to be used together, but the design of
Unicode allows for such creative (ab)uses.

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pteredactyl
RIP

