Robin Houston wrote:
(On the other hand, there *does* seem to be some mysterious relationship between the Yen sign and the backslash: if I press option-Y in a Terminal window, I get a backslash instead.)
As Wikipedia explains:
encoding (a 7-bit code based on ASCII), the code point that would be used for backslash in ASCII is instead a yen mark (¥), while on Korean computer keyboards, the backslash corresponds to the won symbol (₩ or W). Many Japanese environments nonetheless treat it like a backslash, causing confusion.[6] To add to the confusion, some fonts, like MS Mincho, render the backslash character as a ¥, so the Unicode characters 00A5 (¥) and 005C () look almost identical when these fonts are selected.