They're all characters from a writing system. The first comes from the Cyrillic alphabet, the second from Chinese, the third set is Japanese Katakana i think, and the fourth is from the Greek alphabet. The last isn't, though you might find it in Wingdings. ;P Didn't really need to look, except for the Katakana one. Maycontainpeanuts 23:08, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Unicode
editFirst of all, my browser doesn't display all of those fonts correctly, so I had to view the source to get the character codes for these. I went to Unicode. From there, I went to Mapping of Unicode characters to see if I could find out anything about those characters. I had to convert the decimal codes used in the wiki markup to hexadecimal numbers to compare. Here is the group that I found for each of the six characters:
- Cyrillic
- CJK Unified Ideographs
- Katakana
- Katakana
- Greek Extended
- Basic Latin
Now, the one that stood out to me in the list was CJK Unified Ideographs. Back to Unicode, I found that "the CJK ideographs currently are encoded only in their precomposed form." So, I think that 祖 is the odd one out. --timc | Talk 20:42, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
This is odd. From what I can gather:
- ワィ - fi (Japanese)
- From Katakana
- Ж - zhe - equivalent of English "z" (Cyrillic)
- From Cyrillic alphabet
- 祖 - zhu - (Chinese)
- From my own knowledge
- Ὠ - o (Greek) -
- From Greek alphabet and Diacritics
- ي - y? (Arabic)
- I did a search on the above character and yielded several results including Alchemy, Abu Dhabi and Arabic language itself. By comparison I concluded that the character represents an "y" or an "i" sound eqivalent in English
My guess would be probably Ж the only character with non-Asian origins.
Otherwise, it is the only basic character without addition of accents and stuff like that.
- ワィ is a combination of ワ(i) and ィ(wa) to form a new pronunciation)
- 祖 is a combination of two basic "root"s in Chinese to form a new word.
- Ὠ is an omega with a spiritus lenis which alters its pronunciation in a word
- ي represents a vowel sound and according to the diacritics page, Arabic vowels have accents added to them
Ж remains the only character that isn't modifide
-- fiveless 13:21, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)
I can't help but thinking now that the katakana set ワィ is the only set which is made up of two unicode characters. Maycontainpeanuts 11:31, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
My suggested answer is that Ж, 祖, ワィ and Ὠ are in the left-to-right bidi class (L). ي is right-to-left (AL) from the arabic script. [1] — David Remahl 09:58, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Ж
It does not appear in Wikipedia logo SYSS Mouse 00:46, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I thought this was one of the funniest questions of this round. Each time when I looked at this page after an incorrect answer was given, the correct answer was right there in the corner of the screen... The Cyrillic 'zhe' is not in the Wikipedia logo, is answer I was looking for. Eugene van der Pijll 01:50, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)