Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!unido!iraun1!iraul1!kleine
From: kleine@iraul1.ira.uka.de (Karl Kleine)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: followup Helvetica/Geneva/Swiss, semantics of names
Message-ID: <541@iraun1.ira.uka.de>
Date: 25 Apr 88 19:07:46 GMT
Sender: news@iraun1.ira.uka.de
Reply-To: kleine@iraul1.ira.uka.de (Karl Kleine)
Organization: Forschungszentrum Informatik, Karlsruhe, West Germany
Lines: 13

In my recent posting i forgot the obvious (for me :-), namely what 'Helvetica'
stands for [got question]. Well, you may guess from its name, it's Latin, and
says `land of the HELVETII', which was the Latin name of that barbarian (Roman
view of that time :-) tribe living around Lake Geneva (get it?) 2000 years ago.
Nowadays it is the Latin word for Switzerland, which calls itself also
`Confederatio Helvetica' (look at postal stamps).

Summary: `Swiss' and `Geneva' are simply disguises for the Latin word
`Helvetica', which must be avoided for reasons given in my original posting.

Well, at least there is some connection, and they didn't just call it
`Humpty Dumpty' and `F72648jex' :-).
Karl Kleine