Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> [...]
> I have seen a katakana character (glyph?) for "vu", not a normal
> part of Japanese speech, fairly sure. IIrc, it combined a basic
> katakana character with a modifier that was obviously a "misfit".
> (I think I could find a reference.)

It is the sign for syllable "u" combined with the diacritic for "sounded"
consonants. It is a convention only used for transcribing foreign words.
When followed by small-sized "a", "i", "e" and "o", it forms the remaining
syllables: "va", "vi", "ve", "vo".

> "WWW" is simple, memorable, and catches the public fancy. [...]

BTW, the Mandarin Chinese for "World Wide Web" is "Wan Wei Wang" (literally
"ten thousand (wan) directions (wei) network (wang)"), which is very likely
designed to maintain the same acronym as in English.

> I'll try to remember to dig out the origins of the "back tick"
> (U+0060) and the backslash; I have read about both.

The back tick (`) served a dual purpose on typewriters and early computer
printers:

1) Alone, it was an opening single quote, corresponding to the apostrophe
(') used as a closing quote;

2) Precede by a back-space control, it was a combining grave accent that was
overprinted on letters.

> (Does Korean consist of alphabetic logograms? I think both terms are
> somewhat wrong.)

They are certainly wrong used together to describe Korean Hangul!

You could rather call the Korean typographic units "alphabetic
syllabograms". Some modern grammatologist call Hangul a "featural" writing
system, but the reason for this term is still quite obscure to me.

"Logogram/-phic" would imply that the signs of writing convey some sort of
semantic information along with phonetic information. This is absolutely not
the case for a writing systems such as Hangul, which is totally phonetic.

Ciao.
Marco