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Notes on YU-SHIANG WHOLE FISH
The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop
in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term
is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked
whole (not PARSEd) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang) sauce.
Usage: primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine, which could
display this character on the screen. Tends to elicit incredulity
from people who hear about it second-hand.
Yu Shiang Whole Fish is alive and well in Unicode as U+0263 LATIN
SMALL LETTER GAMMA (as opposed to the actual Greek letter at U+03B3,
which usually has a loopless glyph; the form of U+0263 is
consistently loopy). This symbol is included in Unicode as a Latin
letter because it is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet. In
the IPA, gamma represents a voiced velar fricative, the sound
commonly transcribed "gh" in Arabic or Klingon.
J3N Research Labs
Last Updated: 19th May 2007