Turkey: a new symbol for the lira

[William Berkson]

This design, at least used with latin script, looks pretty poor to me. I hope it doesn't catch on.

[Riccardo Sartori]

I guess it looks like half a euro. ;-P
That’s what I saw too.

[dezcom]

It should be something that a person could easily and quickly write with a pencil but still be clearly different from other glyphs and currency marks.

The non-chosen one [dead center on the image posted] looks to have the most potential.

[serdar]

One of the finalists said it was rumored that the slanting revision was made by the prime minister himself.

I think it is quite possible that he might have contributed to the change; given his educational background the prime minister has to have a good understanding of Arabic lettering and as Hrant stated, the symbol in a way, tries to pay tribute to the Arabic calligraphic tradition.

[John Hudson]

Andreas, while I dislike and see all sorts of design problems with this new Turkish currency symbol, it is clearly not a variant of U+20A4. The fact that both the Italian and Turkish currency units are called lira is beside the point: they are not the same currency, and the symbol represents the currency, not the name of the currency. Different countries may use the same currency symbol to represent different currencies -- e.g. $ which is dollar in some countries and peso in others --, and other countries may use the same names but different symbols (I can't think of one off hand).

[eliason]

other countries may use the same names but different symbols (I can't think of one off hand).

The Philippine peso uses ₱, while most Latin American countries use $.

[hrant]

One problem with three bars is something already
alluded to: the crowding would be very troublesome
in terms of typeforms, especially in darker weights.

> so embarassing

Well, we have increasingly seen some gestures of
empathy... and even if those are probably mostly
a ruse to gain Western acceptance (as with the
switch to the Latin alphabet) the allusion remains.

Mostly though I think it's too subtle to really be
actionable by anybody besides extreme nationalists.

> I suppose using the Arabic script as a source
> of inspiration is right out for political reasons.

Actually the current Turkish regime is Islamist,
and Arabic is the language of Islam. In Iran for
example they learn Arabic simply to be able to
read the Qur'aan, even though they dislike Arabs.

In fact I think that middle one from the finalists
would have been the one chosen by the Secularists.

hhp

[Si_Daniels]

>and other countries may use the same names but different symbols (I can't think of one off hand).

Pakistani Rupee vs Indian Rupee?

[Andreas Stötzner]

> it is clearly not a variant of U+20A4 …

• It is a kind of L with a double crossbar,
• it stands for “Lira”,
• it is meant to be a currency sign.

What’s that other than 20A4?

The artificially “designed” symbol of the azerbaidshan currency Manat has been just recently rejected for encoding by ISO, because it was not shown in usage. For some good reason the international character set is not intended to present propagandistic logos or whatsoevers launched by governments to illustrate their pride.

If the “new design” comes in use in Turkey, I presume, then it will end up on the market blackboard looking more or less like ₤.

[k.l.]

Eszett Eszett Eszett ...

[quadibloc]

@Andreas:
For some good reason the international character set is not intended to present propagandistic logos or whatsoevers launched by governments to illustrate their pride.

While I can support the sentiment, since pride and vanity are exaggerated in the types of autocratic government I dislike, it's not particularly unusual for any given country to have a distinctive symbol for its currency unit. Many do; others, in the past, have declined to do so because of economic factors.

Now that type doesn't have to be molded from metal, now that it is "soft", so that a new character which would obsolete a manual typewriter places no one's laser printer in jeopardy - poorer countries, which had to make do with hand-me-down type from other nations want their own symbols finally for their currencies.

This to me isn't the destructive evil pride of some preening militarist - rather, it is the desperate pride of those who struggle to maintain dignity while in poverty. That's something I am inclined to support rather than deprecate.

[kongur]

To be honest with you when I first saw it on the Facebook stream shared by my friends from Turkey – I thought that it was a joke. I am ashamed and so embarrassed by the design which seems to me a failure. I presume it'll show its true face in handwriting. We'll wait and see...

[Alessandro Segalini]

Someone told me the name lira was a tribute to Mussolini but, as John said, that’s beside the point.
I gave a workshop last year at a state university to push the students to think of that missing character as well as of other issues in the Turkish alphabet.
The slanted crossbar is a left “classic” to me since I noticed it in the paper.
Just like Gunnar, I do think that “design contests are usually a bad idea and a designer working back and forth with the commissioning agency might have dealt with a lot of questions including different serif variations before the grand announcement.”
The image that Serdar posted is from this .pdf – I didn’t expect to find the “altın oran” there, it is silly.

[Andreas Stötzner]

> I presume it'll show its true face in handwriting

Yes I think so. It will find it’s master in the hands of ordinary people who have no reason for pretending to be designers.

> desperate pride of those who struggle to maintain dignity while in poverty

I have great respect for Turkish pride. And nowadays the Turkish nation is not that terribly poor and desperate as you might want to suggest. As a matter of fact, Turkey is a rather successful nation with a growing population. So far so good.

But all this is rather not at stake here. The presented “design” is based on a mental mistake (like it was with the official Euro sign) and therefore it will undergo substantial transformation or it will vanish.
The mistake is that the proposed glyph is meant “to look like a piece of design”, rather than to look like a natural currency character.

Pride or prejustice, that is the question.

Anyway, you can always go and furnish 20A4 with any glyph you like.
To my knowlegde there are only two countries with Lira left today, Turkey and Syria. But for Syria as an Arabic writing country the slot 20A4 is of no interest. So in fact, the point is finally left for Turkish conquest ;-)

[Nick Shinn]

Is there any political message in this official announcement, with regards to Turkey’s membership of the EU, and possible adoption of the Euro, which would make the Lira obsolete?

[hrant]

John, I think you're painting an overly negative picture.
I wouldn't talk about desperation in the context of Europe
currently... Somebody said Euro?

Ayse, maybe your expectations are too high? This is after all
a politico-bureaucratic thing. Or maybe you wanted something
more European, less religious? The shape of such a currency
symbol might improve outside views of Turkey in the short
term, but all that would do is delay an honest resolution of real
differences, which have to be overcome internally first. To
me alluding to the long and glorious Arabic past of Turkish
writing can only help. You don't have to be religious (I'm not)
to believe that.

Also, I would not rely on handwriting, for two reasons:
- You're going to get regional variations, plus even in a
given region it's going to take a while for it to stabilize.
You don't want to wait a couple of decades just to settle on a
final country-wide symbol, especially since it could be worse.
- Whatever casual handwriting produces is only elegantly
typographic by dumb luck; the typeform derived from such
a model would probably be either ugly or highly divergent.

Alessandro, what's "altın oran"?
BTW, I'm feeling a panel discussion about this at ISType 2012
coming on. :-) I'm still trying to figure out a way to make it BTW.
If I can swing a Moscow connection for my Armenia trip the cost
of a detour to Istanbul seems to be pretty modest. But the timing
still has to click just right.

Andreas, national pride can be quite important... but mostly
for endangered peoples. In the hands of dominant people it's
sadly mostly used to get the populace to behave contrary to
its own good, as happened during WWI.

> therefore it will undergo substantial
> transformation or it will vanish.

What's "substantial"? That's not what I feel happened
to the Euro. What we see in type is clearly a rendering
of the original idea. It really doesn't matter that the
original idea was intended* to be implemented strictly.
And that actually has its place too, like as decoration
on buildings. In fact it's better to start with something
formal and let people deviate; the other way is hopeless.

* Which I'm not sure was the case. There's a
difference between what politicians say versus
what they think should happen. And if they had
said "this is just a suggestion of how it should
look" then we might have seen some substantial
changes (and you don't want too much deviation).

> you can always go and furnish 20A4 with any glyph you like

Overloading that slot would only confuse. That's almost
as bad as re-using the sputnik (the generic currency slot).

> Syria as an Arabic writing country the slot 20A4 is of no interest

That's an over-simplification - you could be writing about
the Syrian currency in a Latinate language. And if I'm not
mistaken the Syrian currency notes have an English side.

> Is there any political message in this official announcement

Explicitly: unlikely. Implicitly: definitely. :-)
Although it's possible that the Armenian Dram's recent
incorporation into Unicode was a trigger, something like
this would never get off the ground unless there was a
political message. And the only message that seems to
make sense here is "we don't really need Europe"; and
in that context the new mark pretty much had to have
a non-Latin skew.

hhp

[serdar]

what's "altın oran"?

Hrant, it means "golden ratio" in Turkish, the symbol is said to be designed using the golden ratio.

[Si_Daniels]

>So in fact, the point is finally left for Turkish conquest ;-)

Fonts are used to reproduce or render legacy documents, so redrawing a character could be problematic. This is one of the reasons we have Japanese JIS forms for the older designs.

And who's to say an out of favor currency may not be revived at some point in the future by a regime looking to evoke a more glorious past. Although a bunch of European currencies had a stake thrust through their hearts with the introduction of the euro, who's to say Count Drachma (for example) won't come back from the grave? :-)

[serdar]

A fishmonger's usage of the new sign, no slanting crossbar but nicely italicized!

Bulgarian and Greek tourists are confused and thought it's the euro sign, so "TL" is also added to avoid confusion. (Full story here.)

Actually, I like the "TL" design too.

[John Hudson]

Although it's possible that the Armenian Dram's recent incorporation into Unicode was a trigger

Although the Armenian example has proximity and a particular political significance, I think in general we can thank the Indian government's rupee symbol initiative for this recent fad for inventing and encoding symbols for currencies that have got on perfectly well without them for decades. Both the method (open competition) and the justification for the new Turkish symbol is the same as that employed in India; so too are the problems with the design.

[Jens Kutilek]

Apparently someone took the pragmatic approach to encoding (read: »I don’t care«). In the font offered here:

http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/id/25326728/

the new lira symbol is encoded as dieresis (U+00A8). But hey, the font comes with a new keyboard layout!

[Riccardo Sartori]

Paratype’s fonts come with almost any free slot in the currency Unicode block filled with the not yet officially encoded rouble sign.

[Nick Shinn]

LOL

[Si_Daniels]

When told to "Putin Roubles" the expected answer is "how many" not "why?"

[Té Rowan]

WTF?!? Nick lawls out loud???!? Age!