For the last couple months, I’ve been lurking on the public Unicode mailing list. It’s a lot of fun and there are many very smart people who are both serious geeks in technical sense and serious language geeks. I hope that after I take some time to acclimatize myself, I will be able to get more involved and become a productive presence.
Part of being acclimatized is getting used to all of the names for symbols in different scripts. There has been a lot of discussion lately about Arabic’s (apparently very controversial) teh marbuta. In ways I don’t exactly understand, the teh marbuta can change into a teh in certain situations.
Every time I see teh, I can’t help but think it’s a typo made when someone was trying to type a definite article — a very common mistake in places like IRC. I can think of some funny and confusing IRC conversations about the teh and heh code points.