Talk:№

№
Russian is redundant to translingual. Also, it's not an abbreviation - Russian doesn't spell номер with an "n". This is like claiming that π is an English abbreviation of periphery. Smurrayinchester (talk) 14:43, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete. Makes sense. _Korn (talk) 23:09, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep. We’ve had this discussion before, more than once. Russian Cyrillic does not contain the letter N, so it cannot use its Cyrillic alphabet to make the common abbreviation No. (or núm., nº, Nº, n.º, n., as used by various European languages). Therefore, Russian, unlike English, regularly uses the numero sign №. In English, the numero sign traditionally was never used except in professional typesetting. On manual and electric typewriters, as well as typing documents on the modern computer, English and a number of other Roman-alphabet languages use No. (as opposed to №), and other major languages use a local variety such as núm., nº, Nº, Nr., n.º, or n. But Russian does not use “Но.”, “но.”, or anything like that. Russian uses №, not only in professionally produced documents and books, but even on the cheapest old manual typewriters. № is so much a part of Russian writing that all Russian typewriters have always included a key for it, even though some other important symbols, such as the parentheses ( ... ), had to be left off due to space considerations (because Cyrillic has so many letters). For languages such as English that use the Roman alphabet, the numero sign is recognized and understood, but rarely used except by professional typographers. In Russian, the numero sign has long been used by everybody. Logically it should be considered as belonging more to the Cyrillic complement of glyphs than to the Roman. I would prefer to delete the Translingual page as redundant before I would remove the Russian page. —Stephen (Talk) 09:47, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Is № (and its plural №№) in Cyrillic an exclusively Russian invention, or do other Cyrillic languages use it? Even if we exclude Russian's close cousins like Belarusian and Ukrainian, the Bulgarian Wiktionary has it, as does the Kalmyk Wikipedia. Further afield, Japanese uses the symbol as well. Russian doesn't appear to be unique in using № this way. The symbol is simply translingual. Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:56, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, the Japanese also use it, and for the same reason that the Russians use it (their script lacks the letters). Maybe the problem is the definition of translingual that we use for our translingual sections. In my opinion, our use of translingual is for words in the Roman alphabet, especially Latin and some technical words such as metric measurements. I don’t consider Chinese characters that are also used by Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese to be translingual in the sense that we use it, because they are not used by the English-speaking countries. I also don’t consider words and names shared by the languages that write in Cyrillic to be translingual as we use the term. Just as we have pages for each Cyrillic letter ({{э]], ж, я, including Russian sections), we should keep № with a Russian section because it is used in Russian as a native symbol, and is much more used by Russian writers than by English writers. —Stephen (Talk) 12:35, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep as a Russian entry and Translingual (possibly some other languages, as mentioned by Stephen). I'm not sure about the formatting and the header, it probably belongs to punctuations because it's non-verbal and doesn't need transliteration. The reading for the symbol is {{m|ru|но́мер||number}}. Roman letter "N" is not used in Russian. Yes, the symbol is used heavily by Russians. --Anatoli T. {{sup|(обсудить}}/{{sup|вклад)}} 12:48, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
 * There comes a point where you have to ask what the point of translingual is if we then add individual languages below with an identical meaning. Having said that, in this case the meanings aren't identical so I'm fine with it. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:22, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I'll try to explain with another example. Character ". " represents a full stop in Chinese and Japanese, currently it's only used in these two languages (if we consider all Chinese lects using Chinese characters one language). It's part of the standard letters used in these scripts, so it makes sense to leave where they belong - under appropriate language headers and categories. Character "№" is only used in a limited number of languages. It may be worth to keep it under the appropriate language headers. --Anatoli T. {{sup|(обсудить}}/{{sup|вклад)}} 11:39, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Aren't they? They're all "Symbol for indicating numbers". Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:23, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
 * There was an RFD for & (→ Talk:&), and we have decided to separate language-specific information. In the case of №, I think the plural form №№ is special enough to mention. — T AKASUGI Shinji (talk) 02:38, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep per Atitarev and TAKASUGI Shinji. bd2412 T 01:03, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Kept. bd2412 T 20:20, 31 May 2015 (UTC) {{archive-bottom}}

RFC discussion: June–July 2010
The translingual section has a translation section. I thought this was against policy or practice. There are so many symbols that have structure problems that I suspect there is a serious need for rethinking what translingual symbol entries are supposed/meant to be. In any event, it is beyond my pay grade. DCDuring TALK 17:42, 14 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I believe this page began as a Russian-only entry, but someone changed it to English (I don’t think this symbol is used by any language that uses the Roman alphabet, but is restricted to Cyrillic). So the translation section was added and Russian was re-added below it. Then it got switched to translingual. I don’t really see the purpose of translingual most of the time...I suppose it is translingual, strictly speaking, since Serbian and Bulgarian use it, but if any Roman-using language uses it, it is only since Unicode came into being. The Cyrillic languages have used it for centuries, since they do not have the Roman letter N. —Stephen 17:15, 15 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Zapped; was going to add the translations to no., but they were all there already. No opinion on translinguality; if someone can find the original proposal for adding this symbol to Unicode, that might contain useful info on the known scope of use.  Certainly Roman scripts were using No as an abbreviation for "number" long before Unicode, but in a pre-digital text, I'm not sure how one would distinguish the symbol as such from a mere N followed by a superscript underlined lowercase O. -- Visviva 17:51, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. DCDuring TALK 18:29, 15 June 2010 (UTC)


 * RE: "if someone can find the original proposal for adding this symbol to Unicode": It's in ISO-8859-5, so I doubt there was any specific proposal, per se: I assume that Unicode was intended from the very beginning, to be a superset of every ISO 8859 code-page. At the very least, even if they didn't originally intend to enable round-trip compatibility with all widely-used existing character sets, at some point they did make that decision, so they would have added it because of ISO-8859-9 or because of the more widely-used Windows code-page 1251, which also contains it. —Ruakh TALK 04:01, 12 July 2010 (UTC)