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Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

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Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#241

Post by IshKebab »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #41
koboll wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Be…

That isn't Unicode's mission though. To get new characters added you have to show that people use it or would use it if it were available.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#242

Post by GekkePrutser »

kadoban wrote: post #107
colejohnson66 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Be…

For as inclusive as that mission is, it seems weird to me how limited in certain areas unicode is. For instance, people use peach emoji since there isn't one for butt, eggplant since there's no penis, etc. This doesn't contradict the stated goal exactly, but it seems against the spirit of it at least.

> For instance, people use peach emoji since there isn't one for butt, eggplant since there's no penis, etc.

Personally I think there should be, actually. There's all these other body parts but these are left out. Emoji is almost becoming a language and the good thing is that everyone can understand them, regardless of language. For example I could imagine these could be very useful in an international medical setting. Or for sexting, obviously, we can pretend that's not a thing but that's a bit too Victorian for me.

Of course they're not appropriate in some settings but so are many words.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#243

Post by GekkePrutser »

koala_man wrote: post #65
bityard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today, I wrote a document by hand containing a new symbol that only looks like genitalia if you squint really hard. Where do I apply to have it included in unicode so that it can be digitized properly?

Can you reuse 𓂸 or 𓂺?

Lol I never knew those existed. Apparently they're egyption hieroglyphs but it really makes me wonder the meanings of them now :)

I also wonder how these didn't become insanely popular overnight, like the famous eggplant.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#244

Post by mbrubeck »

jerf wrote: post #11

When my kids were young, I accidentally flubbed the pronunciation of "Santa Claus" once and said something that sounded a lot like "Centiclops", which I decided to roll with. Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except the as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes. Today I learn that Centiclops effectively has a Unicode character. As Centiclops' representative in the wo…

The nice thing about ꙮ having ten eyes is that you can now combine ten of them with U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER [1] to make a centiclops grapheme, as long as your font has a glyph for that particular ligature. (Readers without centiclops-compatible fonts will simply see ten separate ꙮ glyphs, an acceptable fallback for legacy systems.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#245

Post by Stamp01 »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #119
Stamp01 wrote: post #35

I don't understand why this character needs to exist given that, at least according to the author, it has only been seen once in the wild, and it's semantically identical to another more widely used character. I'm glad I'm not responsible for unicode. Clearly I have the wrong mindset for it.

Surprisingly many characters in Unicode are only recorded a few times if not once before the assignment. Chinese characters for example have a lot of them, because it was relatively frequent to make a new character for newborns before the modernity and some of them have survived through literatures but otherwise seen no uses (e.g. 𡸫 U+21E2B only appears once in the Records of the Three Kingdoms 三國志). But they have s…

I didn't realize that digitization of all historical works was the goal of unicode. There's plenty of space for everything. And only a few fonts out there aim for complete coverage, like noto.

I just don't have the personal fortitude to attempt something so grandiose. Seems like a fool's errand.

Also, keep in mind there's not just one multiocular O. There's a bunch with varying numbers of eyes.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#246

Post by db48x »

Stamp01 wrote: post #245
lifthrasiir wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly many characters in Unicode are only recorded a few times if not once before the assignment. Chinese characters for example have a lot of them, because it was relatively frequent to make a new character for newborns before the modernity and some of them have survived through literatures but otherwise seen no uses (e.g. 𡸫 U+21E2B only appears once in the Records of the Three Kingdoms 三國志). But they have s…

I didn't realize that digitization of all historical works was the goal of unicode. There's plenty of space for everything. And only a few fonts out there aim for complete coverage, like noto. I just don't have the personal fortitude to attempt something so grandiose. Seems like a fool's errand. Also, keep in mind there's not just one multiocular O. There's a bunch with varying numbers of eyes.

Not every goal needs to be something you can accomplish in a day or a year or even one lifetime.

There are not quite 8000 spoken languages on Earth at the moment, and a lot of them are from cultures that never invented writing. SIL has sent a missionary to most of them to learn the language, invent a writing system for it, teach it to them, and translate the New Testament into it. Most of those are fairly standard alphabets using characters from the Latin scripts, plus perhaps a few new characters or new combinations of character and diacritical. The task is large, but finite.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#247

Post by db48x »

aasasd wrote: post #160
Waterluvian wrote: post #136

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m not an expert by any means. But something just doesn’t feel right when you’ve got unicode with a character with one known use from forever ago. Doesn’t this open up the flood gates to just a ridiculous amount of work or else biased gatekeeping? How much work would it be to implement your own font of the entire unicode set? Or is that not actually a thing and fonts implement as-…

I'll tell you more: there are Unicode glyphs without known usage.

And then there are the ghost characters, which are known never to have been used.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#248

Post by dragonwriter »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #173
anthk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cent is easy to grasp if you speak a Romance.

But it doesn't combine with ops. You'd need to talk about a hecatops or a hecatontops. And even more than it can't combine with ops, it can't combine with clops because there is no such root.

> But it doesn't combine with ops.

Sure, it does, in English, which stole prefixes, suffixes, and roots from Latin, Greek, and many other languages, and has no problem using them together, without special concern about where it got them from.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#249

Post by dragonwriter »

Someone wrote: post #227
thaumasiotes wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it doesn't combine with ops. You'd need to talk about a hecatops or a hecatontops. And even more than it can't combine with ops, it can't combine with clops because there is no such root.

It does. Combining Latin and Greek roots is done fairly frequently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_word mentions automobile, chloroform, hexadecimal, micro-instruction, petroleum, television and a few others.

Citing wikipedia (“wiki” is a Hawaiian-derived root, and “-pedia” a Greek-derived suffix) is particularly appropriate here.
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