A comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters (2016)

Re:A comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters... by lioeters on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @03:23AM (#21700513)

You got a point there (pun intended :) about the symbol for zero.

I guess I was being generous with interpreting the parent comment, by mentioning the (possibly common and cross-cultural) visual association of a circle with womanhood, a straight vertical line with manhood.

I didn't mean to imply that the symbols for zero and one have direct historical origins in those ideas - like the parent comment might have suggested - but I do think there is a philosophical or artistic merit in drawing the analogy.

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Re:A comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters... by perl4ever on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @08:48PM (#21709251)

I never heard of this. Have you ever heard of the symbols also used for Mars and Venus indicating male and female?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_symbol

According to that page, in some contexts, a circle means female and a square means male, but I've never heard of that before either.

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Re:A comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters... by lioeters on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @11:36PM (#21710023)

Interesting, I've seen the symbols for Mars and Venus being used to represent genders, but not a square or triangle for male.

As for zero/circle/woman and one/vertical line/man.. I guess in my mind, they couldn't be more obvious, universal and simple - to put it crudely: the hole and the stick.

But also: off and on, dark and light, absence and presence.

(So far, I have found no historical evidence that supports the above theory, no basis in logic or fact. I'll leave it as idle speculation on a possible primordial/mythological way of thinking in pictures, with perhaps two of the most primitive symbols.)

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