That “LAMDA” spelling stuck out to me, but it’s correct in the context of Unicode. This is “motivated by the pre-existing names in ISO 8859-7 […] as well as by preferences expressed by the Greek National Body.” unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y...
And FWIW when I was at school the confusion between Hebrew alef and Arabic alef wouldn't have existed either. They were "aleph" (Hebrew) and "alif" (Arabic).
I wouldn't say it's wrong, standardly or not standardly :) "Lamda" is the letter in the modern Greek alphabet, hence it was correctly named as thus in ISO 8859-7 which encoded modern Greek and that got copied to the "Greek and Coptic" unicode block, which is also intended to encode modern Greek. The ancient-Greek only letters are in the "Greek Extended" block, where if a λ appeared it would be called with the classic Greek spelling "Lambda", but of course it's not there as it's essentially the same letter.
The OED prefers "lambda". For "lamda" it says "see lambda". The version with a b has been more common in English since time immemorial.
Letter names in Unicode seem to be, as far as is practical, spelled in English, and how modern Greeks prefer to spell it in Greek isn't very important. See also LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S, which is spelled in English, and not in German as ESZETT or SCHARFES S.
I was not saying "lamda" is the correct spelling for the "Greek letter λ" in general. I was saying, it is the correct spelling for the very specific usage of the character in the context of naming the modern greek character set. It is a different meaning from "lambda", which is a word you can indeed find in an English dictionary and it is used internationally in reference to classics and math (or maths if you are British) and more.
You are not supposed to look into a definition for a character name, none of the myriad characters of various scripts have one, there is AFAIK some sort of committee process which tries to get the best english names/transliterations.
I would certainly not consider "LAMBDA" to be "wrong" or "less right" if it had been used instead, but, technically, "LAMDA" is not "wrong" either. The inverse would be wrong of course, you can't use "lamda" for anything else (there's no lamda calculus).
And it's not important in any case, as long as nobody changes it and breaks old code :D
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That “LAMDA” spelling stuck out to me, but it’s correct in the context of Unicode. This is “motivated by the pre-existing names in ISO 8859-7 […] as well as by preferences expressed by the Greek National Body.” unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y...
Yeah, it's wrong, but at least it's standardly wrong :-) My compose key mapping will accept both versions: github.com/DrHyde/configurations/b...
And FWIW when I was at school the confusion between Hebrew alef and Arabic alef wouldn't have existed either. They were "aleph" (Hebrew) and "alif" (Arabic).
I wouldn't say it's wrong, standardly or not standardly :) "Lamda" is the letter in the modern Greek alphabet, hence it was correctly named as thus in ISO 8859-7 which encoded modern Greek and that got copied to the "Greek and Coptic" unicode block, which is also intended to encode modern Greek. The ancient-Greek only letters are in the "Greek Extended" block, where if a λ appeared it would be called with the classic Greek spelling "Lambda", but of course it's not there as it's essentially the same letter.
The OED prefers "lambda". For "lamda" it says "see lambda". The version with a b has been more common in English since time immemorial.
Letter names in Unicode seem to be, as far as is practical, spelled in English, and how modern Greeks prefer to spell it in Greek isn't very important. See also LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S, which is spelled in English, and not in German as ESZETT or SCHARFES S.
I was not saying "lamda" is the correct spelling for the "Greek letter λ" in general. I was saying, it is the correct spelling for the very specific usage of the character in the context of naming the modern greek character set. It is a different meaning from "lambda", which is a word you can indeed find in an English dictionary and it is used internationally in reference to classics and math (or maths if you are British) and more.
You are not supposed to look into a definition for a character name, none of the myriad characters of various scripts have one, there is AFAIK some sort of committee process which tries to get the best english names/transliterations.
I would certainly not consider "LAMBDA" to be "wrong" or "less right" if it had been used instead, but, technically, "LAMDA" is not "wrong" either. The inverse would be wrong of course, you can't use "lamda" for anything else (there's no lamda calculus).
And it's not important in any case, as long as nobody changes it and breaks old code :D