kfogel@collab.net wrote:
>>Did I or did I not say on #svn yesterday that Subverion needs a logo? So
>>I played around a bit, looking for ideas. One of the things I tries was
>>looking up "subversion" on http://zhongwen.com/zi.htm, but I didn't like
>>the ideographs. Then I tried just "version", and got back two
>>characters: the firs, "ban3", means "printing blocks, edition"; the
>>second, "ben3", means "root, origin, source; basis" -- *and* it looks a
>>bit like an inverted tree, complete with a cross-branch merge marker! :-)
>>
>>The result is at http://www.xbc.nu/svn/subversion.png. It also makes a
>>very nice icon, even at 16x16 pixels.
>>
>
>It _is_ visually beautiful, very nice. But perhaps not as appropriate
>as one might think...
>
>That word, "ben3", is a very general term -- one definition is indeed
>"version", in the sense of "edition", but it's not really one of the
>principal definitions. The "root/source/origin" meaning is much
>stronger, followed closely by "volume" (as in "volume 3 of the
>encyclopedia").
>
>It's also the second character of the 2-character word meaning
>"Japan", in both Chinese and Japanese, and among readers of those
>languages it would bestow a sort of implicit nationalism on
>Subversion. :-)
>
>Sorry to knock down a proposal without making a better one; not very
>constructive of me, but I have no particular skill at making logos.
>Do know some Mandarin, however, and therefore would like to help us
>avoid the pitfall of "non-Chinese decides to use a Chinese word as
>part of a logo or slogan, looks it up in a dictionary, and ends up
>with a word that is inappropriate due to unwanted primary meanings and
>lack of context". In general, you can't take a two-character compound
>(ban3 ben3, in this case), break it up, and expect either component to
>mean the same as the whole compound. Like if you want a logo for your
>waterfall, it wouldn't work to just use "fall", that kind of thing.
>
>-K
>
I'm entirely aware that one has to know a bit more than just how to look
things up in the dictionary. That's why I said I was playing around. I'd
definitely not want to adopt such a logo without checking with a chinese
speaker. (Of course, I *did* commit the icons for Win32, just to get
things moving, hehe.)
If only I were able to actually *draw* a logo, not just paste together
graphic elements ...
--
Brane �ibej <brane_at_xbc.nu> http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:44 2006
