14 ms·

A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode

323 points by polm23 6y ago

msla 6y ago
And here it is: (Now we see how many people get the joke.)
- msla 6y ago
  Wow. Now even I don't get the joke. When I posted, the post included this character: U+262D https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/262d/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/262d/index.htm Unicode Character 'HAMMER AND SICKLE' (U+262D) Yep, it gets eaten by HN. It's in the BMP, dammit! It should be safe!
  - wolfgang42 6y ago
    HN intentionally removes “emoji-type” characters (I don’t know what the exact criteria are, it’s definitely more complicated than which plane the character is on) from posts. The only time I’ve seen this cause issues is when trying to discuss Unicode itself; presumably the moderators decided this is an acceptable tradeoff.
    - loeg 6y ago
      Possibly the entire "Miscellaneous Symbols" block?
    - josephcsible 6y ago
      Automatically silently stripping characters from posts seems like a bad idea. If we want to forbid characters from posts, wouldn't it be way safer to prevent the post and tell the user to remove them?
      - kps 6y ago
        There's no obvious criteria. 𓂺
        edgyquant 6y ago
        Could you not have picked a different emoji (also why is that a a character?)
        jle17 6y ago
        > (also why is that a a character?) It's in Unicode because it's a hieroglyph. Now why is it a hieroglyph I think you would need to ask ancient Egyptians.
  - ramshorns 6y ago
    It's invisible, it's a ghost character!
    - klyrs 6y ago
      I see it fine. Enable showdead in your account preferences.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        Then who was phone?
- GeorgeRichard 6y ago
  "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." The Communist Manifesto
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Is there a symbol for fascism?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - djur 6y ago
    There are swastikas facing both directions as religious symbols, but not angled Hakenkreuz like the Nazis tended to use. There also isn't a fasces or anything like that, although I feel like that's a less widely recognized symbol (and of course it is used in non-fascist contexts as well). Probably the most interesting political symbol in Unicode is the Emblem of Iran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_of_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_of_Iran It's referred to officially as "FARSI SYMBOL", which apparently was a euphemism chosen because during ISO standardization of Unicode the original name "SYMBOL OF IRAN" was deemed unacceptable. As a logo, it wouldn't make it into the standard today, but nobody knows how it originally got in there: http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/363208.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/36320...
    - riffraff 6y ago
      The Celtic cross is also there, tho tipically represented as asymmetrical, while the one used in fascist context is symmetrical.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    W: "The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning "a bundle of sticks", ultimately from the Latin word fasces. The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break." So just look for a farming-related item with 2 or more stick-like objects bound together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
gm3dmo 6y ago
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#:~:text=A%20spectre%20is%20haunting%20Europe,Radicals%20and%20German%20police-spies.&text=Communism%20is%20already%20acknowledged%20by,to%20be%20itself%20a%20power https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m....
pmoriarty 6y ago
A printing mistake was also responsible for the lambda in Lambda Calculus.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Another printing mistake gave English the word "dord"[0] (at least temporarily, and from a prescriptivist point of view). While this "word" didn't influence Unicode, it is somewhat analogous to the situation in Japan where there are symbols that are arguably in the language but which are never meaningfully used. I assume that the situation is even stranger in Japanese because these mistakenly created symbols do not have either an associated definition (even a mistaken one) or a pronunciation. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb0YoRMXIY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb0YoRMXIY0
- kmill 6y ago
  I thought it was more of an accident? The story I know goes that Church used hats over variables, and then he switched over to lambda prefixes for ease of printing.
  - crdrost 6y ago
    I have often thought that if I were to teach a class on functional programming, I would use JavaScript’s fat arrow notation to introduce lambda calculus. Less succinct with all the extra parentheses that occur in function calls but I think it’s easy enough to explain.
    - kmill 6y ago
      Pretty much the same idea, but in math contexts I tend to use the \mapsto arrow (↦), since mathematicians are more familiar with this than lambda calculus. (The fat arrow seems like an interesting alternative in programming contexts, but I worry that it might be confused with implication.) The function that swaps the arguments to a two-argument function: f ↦ ((x, y) ↦ f(y, x))
      - 6y ago
banana_giraffe 6y ago
I love this. There are lots of characters in Unicode I'd love to know the history of, but searching for such things is hard, at best. The one I've stumbled across recently are the "Negative Squared Latin Capital Letter" (1F170 - 1F189 [1]). The 26 letters are there, but "A", "B", "O", and "P" are special. Blood types and a parking symbol. Sure, but why? Why was it decided we needed all of the Latin letters in inverted squares, except those? Why aren't they their own symbol? I'm not complaining here, I just want to know the history. I'd also love to know the history of the other Latin letter ranges. It feels super odd to me to have, say the "Mathematical Bold Fraktur" range of characters (1D56C - 1D59F [2]). What's the history of including a font in Unicode? Why did we stop with the few that are in there? This is probably somewhere online, but I can't find it. [1] https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=negative+squared https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=negati... [2] https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=mathematical+bold+fraktur https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=mathem...
- chrisoverzero 6y ago
  >Sure, but why? Some OSes display some unicode characters as emoji-default. These characters were selected for that for exactly the reason you surmise. There’s a [text presentation selector][] to enforce the text variation. This is also useful for making (yellow triangle with exclamation point inside) become (single color triangle outline with same-color exclamation point inside). ETA: Ah, OK, here’s a post with pictures demonstrating this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48534667/how-to-display-a-colored-emoji/48535790#48535790 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48534667/how-to-display-... [text presentation selector]: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#def_text_presentation_selector http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#def_text_presentation_s...
  - kps 6y ago
    > Some OSes display some unicode characters as emoji-default. Those characters have the Emoji_Presentation Unicode property, as listed in https://www.unicode.org/Public/13.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.txt https://www.unicode.org/Public/13.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.t... If a site wished to exclude garish blobs from comments while permitting textual symbols, that would be the right way to do it.
the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
One of my favorite Unicode oddities is in the cyrillic block. Some books used to use the letter "ꙩ" when writing the word eye (ꙩко). The letter was (from what I can tell) never used for anything else. Because dual is a thing, clever people then went to write ꙭчи or Ꙫчи to mean two eyes. Both those characters made it into Unicode as there was some use in historic script. However even completely absurd variations made its way into unicode. The "many eyed seraphim" is written as серафими многоꙮчитїи. So if you need to write something with a lot of eyes, you can use ꙮ.
- nsajko 6y ago
  These four Unicode symbols have a similarly obscure origin: EDIT: automatically removed by HN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)#Notation_and_recording_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)#Notation_and_recordi... Relevant thread on the Unicode mailing list, with Subject "Purpose of and rationale behind Go Markers U+2686 to U+2689" is here: https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m03/thread.html https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m03/thread.ht...
  - echelon 6y ago
    > EDIT: automatically removed by HN I'm curious about this. Was your post removed for containing certain unicode characters?
    - the_only_law 6y ago
      Just tested it, tried a comment with an emoji and it never appeared. So I'd assume so.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - aendruk 6y ago
      Probably not the whole post, just the uncommon characters. A few days ago HN deleted several characters from my comment immediately upon posting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24851415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24851415
nwellnhof 6y ago
Another interesting character is U+2189 Vulgar Fraction Zero Thirds: ↉ IIRC, it also came from a Japanese code page and was probably used for baseball scores, although the exact origin and usage remains a bit of a mystery.
- rui314 6y ago
  It is very likely that this symbol is added for baseball. It's not from the Japanese national standard but from a character set for Japanese TV sets called ARIB charset (1). According to Wikipedia (2), ↉ is actually used for baseball scores. It says that if a pitcher is removed before any batter is put out, he threw ↉ innings for that inning on the record. 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARIB_STD_B24_character_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARIB_STD_B24_character_set 2 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8A%95%E7%90%83%E5%9B%9E https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8A%95%E7%90%83%E5%9B%9E
jmcgough 6y ago
I love how weird errors like this can affect culture and the language itself. There was an album put out last year named 彁, which is one of the more well-known ghost kanji: http://www.rd-sounds.com/c97.html http://www.rd-sounds.com/c97.html
- bhaak 6y ago
  How is it pronounced given that this is a non existing kanji? That's a similar problem as Prince's name during the time he had a symbol as name for which the workaround was just to call it "symbol".
  - wtn 6y ago
    Read it by the implied phonetic component, 哥。 More broadly speaking, there are some true facts cited in this post, but the basic premise is horseshit, and the whole of it should be retracted. As Andrew West has pointed out, these characters were not "made up" as they are real characters attested in Chinese texts. From a Unicode perspective, none of them is a "ghost character" at all.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arcorann 6y ago
      I disagree with your characterisation as "horseshit" -- although eleven of the characters were subsequently located in other texts, these texts are different from the sources that were supposedly cited when they were input into JIS C 6226 in 1978 [1]. Of the twelve characters cited as "ghost characters", nine of them had claimed sources, but on further investigation were not in the claimed sources or were data entry errors of similar characters in those sources, while three did not have any claimed sources, of which two were later found in other texts (and one of those is believed to be an error), and 彁 has never been located in any text predating its input into JIS C 6226. [1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97#%E5%85%B8%E6%8B%A0%E3%81%8C%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%8E%E3%81%AA%E3%82%82%E3%81%AE https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5...
ineedasername 6y ago
I know, it's not really the same thing, but this reminded me of the RYRYRY test code used with Baudot at the beginning of teletype messages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
neolog 6y ago
I've been wondering why there are subscripts for only 12 lowercase subscripts: ₐₑₒₓₔₕₖₗₘₙₚₛₜ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscripts_and_Subscripts_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscripts_and_Subscripts_(U... Anybody know the reason?
- phonon 6y ago
  It's used for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09028-n3571-upa-additions.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09028-n3571-upa-additions.p...
  - neolog 6y ago
    Interesting, how did you figure that out?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      You can look up the characters in the database, they fall under "Subscripts for UPA".
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  There's more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
dialogbox 6y ago
> nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced Definitely the legend of this area is Korean[1]. Almost 95% (or even more) of characters have never been used and no one know how to pronounce it. Even from the first line of the blocks, I could find weird characters like 갅, 갌, 갍, 갎. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Syllables#Block https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Syllables#Block
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  > Almost 95% (or even more) of characters have never been used and no one know how to pronounce it. This is absolutely false. KS X 1001, the primary character set for Hangul, contains 2,350 out of 11,172 (modern) syllables, which is definitely much larger than 5%. And that's not enough (KS X 1001 itself was heavily criticized for this), there are multiple secondary character sets got into Unicode; Unicode 1.1 had 6,656 arbitrarily ordered characters that were finally replaced by 11,172 neatly ordered characters by 2.0. They are real characters people use, my very old personal research [1] indicates that at least a half of them has legitimately appeared in the chat log for example. Pronunciation-wise, multiple consonant clusters in the final position indicate conditional pronunciation. "갅", for example, comprises of ㄱ g + ㅏ ah + ㄴ n + ㅈ j which is normally pronounced "gahn" by its own but "gahn-j" when followed by a vowel (e.g. "갅이" is pronounced "간지" gahn-ji). Phonetically Korean only has 7 possible codas and other final consonants exist because Korean orthography is a compromise between phoneticism and ideographicism and some words had to be adjusted to show their morphological roots. [1] https://j.mearie.org/post/24348147729/hangeul-usage-in-irc-chatting https://j.mearie.org/post/24348147729/hangeul-usage-in-irc-c... (in Korean)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tony 6y ago
> Following the general adoption of the JIS standards these characters all made their way into Unicode This is the exact kind of place lost glyphs would find a home. The UNIHAN effort (which spans tons of sources) is very dedicated to cataloging these efforts. I run a few projects based around UNIHAN, which is geared toward cataloging glyphs that are variants, many of which are archaic and no longer used. Write up about UNIHAN: https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/unihan.html https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/unihan.html I have a tool to export Unicode's database of CJK characters to CSV, JSON, and so on: https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/ https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/ Python library: https://cihai.git-pull.com/ https://cihai.git-pull.com/ CLI tool (compare to cjklib [1]): https://cihai-cli.git-pull.com/ https://cihai-cli.git-pull.com/ No knife / character decomposition. I'm working on it but the data is GPL'd: https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids/issues/65 https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids/issues/65
pkamb 6y ago
related: Did Burmese typewriters contain an upside-down character, which subsequently became proper typewriter style? https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/49653/did-burmese-typewriters-contain-an-upside-down-character-which-subsequently-bec https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/49653/did-burme...
HybridLightAI 6y ago
Computer viruses are usually deliberate and typically malicious. But spontaneous forms of computer life are possible. If enough of them are generated one of them might acquire the ability to reproduce. Then there is the possibility, however remote, of evolving a form of artificial intelligence.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Many of the original Hong Kong extension is for male and female sex organ used in Cantonese. They were there for court to write down what the gangster talk to each other exactly.
xg15 6y ago
> For example, 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record "山 over 女". "山 over 女" occurs in the name of a particular place and was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn't print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied. When reading the copy, the line where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to the character by mistake. The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe where ASCII was invented in asia and latin characters were not available until unicode was established: > For example, Ä was an error introduced while trying to record A below a dotted line. When reading the copy, the dotted line was added to the character by mistake. The original character (A) was not added to Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me.
mlok 6y ago
Slightly related : On French keyboards there is a key dedicated to the letter ù (u with an accent) which is used in one word only in the French language : "où" which means "where". ("ou" without an accent means "or", sql would be funny in French : SELECTIONNE * DE matable OÙ type='A' OU type='B' )
rurban 6y ago
The only spectres that are haunting Unicode still are U+3164 HANGUL FILLER and U+ffa0 HALFWIDTH HANGUL FILLER, which are not whitespace but valid ID_Start and ID_Continue chars. Zerowidth whitespace as identifiers are illegal. eg https://github.com/jagracey/Awesome-Unicode#user-content-variable-identifiers-can-effectively-include-whitespace https://github.com/jagracey/Awesome-Unicode#user-content-var... These unused glyphs on the post are harmless, because unused.

323 points by polm23 6y ago

msla 6y ago

And here it is: (Now we see how many people get the joke.)

msla 6y ago
Wow. Now even I don't get the joke. When I posted, the post included this character: U+262D https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/262d/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/262d/index.htm Unicode Character 'HAMMER AND SICKLE' (U+262D) Yep, it gets eaten by HN. It's in the BMP, dammit! It should be safe!
- wolfgang42 6y ago
  HN intentionally removes “emoji-type” characters (I don’t know what the exact criteria are, it’s definitely more complicated than which plane the character is on) from posts. The only time I’ve seen this cause issues is when trying to discuss Unicode itself; presumably the moderators decided this is an acceptable tradeoff.
  - loeg 6y ago
    Possibly the entire "Miscellaneous Symbols" block?
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    Automatically silently stripping characters from posts seems like a bad idea. If we want to forbid characters from posts, wouldn't it be way safer to prevent the post and tell the user to remove them?
    - kps 6y ago
      There's no obvious criteria. 𓂺
      - edgyquant 6y ago
        Could you not have picked a different emoji (also why is that a a character?)
        jle17 6y ago
        > (also why is that a a character?) It's in Unicode because it's a hieroglyph. Now why is it a hieroglyph I think you would need to ask ancient Egyptians.
- ramshorns 6y ago
  It's invisible, it's a ghost character!
  - klyrs 6y ago
    I see it fine. Enable showdead in your account preferences.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      Then who was phone?
GeorgeRichard 6y ago
"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." The Communist Manifesto
mleonhard 6y ago
Is there a symbol for fascism?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- djur 6y ago
  There are swastikas facing both directions as religious symbols, but not angled Hakenkreuz like the Nazis tended to use. There also isn't a fasces or anything like that, although I feel like that's a less widely recognized symbol (and of course it is used in non-fascist contexts as well). Probably the most interesting political symbol in Unicode is the Emblem of Iran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_of_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_of_Iran It's referred to officially as "FARSI SYMBOL", which apparently was a euphemism chosen because during ISO standardization of Unicode the original name "SYMBOL OF IRAN" was deemed unacceptable. As a logo, it wouldn't make it into the standard today, but nobody knows how it originally got in there: http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/363208.html http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/36320...
  - riffraff 6y ago
    The Celtic cross is also there, tho tipically represented as asymmetrical, while the one used in fascist context is symmetrical.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  W: "The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning "a bundle of sticks", ultimately from the Latin word fasces. The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break." So just look for a farming-related item with 2 or more stick-like objects bound together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

gm3dmo 6y ago

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#:~:text=A%20spectre%20is%20haunting%20Europe,Radicals%20and%20German%20police-spies.&text=Communism%20is%20already%20acknowledged%20by,to%20be%20itself%20a%20power https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m....

pmoriarty 6y ago

A printing mistake was also responsible for the lambda in Lambda Calculus.

dane-pgp 6y ago
Another printing mistake gave English the word "dord"[0] (at least temporarily, and from a prescriptivist point of view). While this "word" didn't influence Unicode, it is somewhat analogous to the situation in Japan where there are symbols that are arguably in the language but which are never meaningfully used. I assume that the situation is even stranger in Japanese because these mistakenly created symbols do not have either an associated definition (even a mistaken one) or a pronunciation. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb0YoRMXIY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb0YoRMXIY0
kmill 6y ago
I thought it was more of an accident? The story I know goes that Church used hats over variables, and then he switched over to lambda prefixes for ease of printing.
- crdrost 6y ago
  I have often thought that if I were to teach a class on functional programming, I would use JavaScript’s fat arrow notation to introduce lambda calculus. Less succinct with all the extra parentheses that occur in function calls but I think it’s easy enough to explain.
  - kmill 6y ago
    Pretty much the same idea, but in math contexts I tend to use the \mapsto arrow (↦), since mathematicians are more familiar with this than lambda calculus. (The fat arrow seems like an interesting alternative in programming contexts, but I worry that it might be confused with implication.) The function that swaps the arguments to a two-argument function: f ↦ ((x, y) ↦ f(y, x))
    - 6y ago

banana_giraffe 6y ago

I love this. There are lots of characters in Unicode I'd love to know the history of, but searching for such things is hard, at best. The one I've stumbled across recently are the "Negative Squared Latin Capital Letter" (1F170 - 1F189 [1]). The 26 letters are there, but "A", "B", "O", and "P" are special. Blood types and a parking symbol. Sure, but why? Why was it decided we needed all of the Latin letters in inverted squares, except those? Why aren't they their own symbol? I'm not complaining here, I just want to know the history. I'd also love to know the history of the other Latin letter ranges. It feels super odd to me to have, say the "Mathematical Bold Fraktur" range of characters (1D56C - 1D59F [2]). What's the history of including a font in Unicode? Why did we stop with the few that are in there? This is probably somewhere online, but I can't find it. [1] https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=negative+squared https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=negati... [2] https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=mathematical+bold+fraktur https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=mathem...

chrisoverzero 6y ago
>Sure, but why? Some OSes display some unicode characters as emoji-default. These characters were selected for that for exactly the reason you surmise. There’s a [text presentation selector][] to enforce the text variation. This is also useful for making (yellow triangle with exclamation point inside) become (single color triangle outline with same-color exclamation point inside). ETA: Ah, OK, here’s a post with pictures demonstrating this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48534667/how-to-display-a-colored-emoji/48535790#48535790 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48534667/how-to-display-... [text presentation selector]: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#def_text_presentation_selector http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#def_text_presentation_s...
- kps 6y ago
  > Some OSes display some unicode characters as emoji-default. Those characters have the Emoji_Presentation Unicode property, as listed in https://www.unicode.org/Public/13.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.txt https://www.unicode.org/Public/13.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.t... If a site wished to exclude garish blobs from comments while permitting textual symbols, that would be the right way to do it.

the_mitsuhiko 6y ago

One of my favorite Unicode oddities is in the cyrillic block. Some books used to use the letter "ꙩ" when writing the word eye (ꙩко). The letter was (from what I can tell) never used for anything else. Because dual is a thing, clever people then went to write ꙭчи or Ꙫчи to mean two eyes. Both those characters made it into Unicode as there was some use in historic script. However even completely absurd variations made its way into unicode. The "many eyed seraphim" is written as серафими многоꙮчитїи. So if you need to write something with a lot of eyes, you can use ꙮ.

nsajko 6y ago
These four Unicode symbols have a similarly obscure origin: EDIT: automatically removed by HN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)#Notation_and_recording_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)#Notation_and_recordi... Relevant thread on the Unicode mailing list, with Subject "Purpose of and rationale behind Go Markers U+2686 to U+2689" is here: https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m03/thread.html https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m03/thread.ht...
- echelon 6y ago
  > EDIT: automatically removed by HN I'm curious about this. Was your post removed for containing certain unicode characters?
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    Just tested it, tried a comment with an emoji and it never appeared. So I'd assume so.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - aendruk 6y ago
    Probably not the whole post, just the uncommon characters. A few days ago HN deleted several characters from my comment immediately upon posting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24851415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24851415

nwellnhof 6y ago

Another interesting character is U+2189 Vulgar Fraction Zero Thirds: ↉ IIRC, it also came from a Japanese code page and was probably used for baseball scores, although the exact origin and usage remains a bit of a mystery.

rui314 6y ago
It is very likely that this symbol is added for baseball. It's not from the Japanese national standard but from a character set for Japanese TV sets called ARIB charset (1). According to Wikipedia (2), ↉ is actually used for baseball scores. It says that if a pitcher is removed before any batter is put out, he threw ↉ innings for that inning on the record. 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARIB_STD_B24_character_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARIB_STD_B24_character_set 2 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8A%95%E7%90%83%E5%9B%9E https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8A%95%E7%90%83%E5%9B%9E

jmcgough 6y ago

I love how weird errors like this can affect culture and the language itself. There was an album put out last year named 彁, which is one of the more well-known ghost kanji: http://www.rd-sounds.com/c97.html http://www.rd-sounds.com/c97.html

bhaak 6y ago
How is it pronounced given that this is a non existing kanji? That's a similar problem as Prince's name during the time he had a symbol as name for which the workaround was just to call it "symbol".
- wtn 6y ago
  Read it by the implied phonetic component, 哥。 More broadly speaking, there are some true facts cited in this post, but the basic premise is horseshit, and the whole of it should be retracted. As Andrew West has pointed out, these characters were not "made up" as they are real characters attested in Chinese texts. From a Unicode perspective, none of them is a "ghost character" at all.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - Arcorann 6y ago
    I disagree with your characterisation as "horseshit" -- although eleven of the characters were subsequently located in other texts, these texts are different from the sources that were supposedly cited when they were input into JIS C 6226 in 1978 [1]. Of the twelve characters cited as "ghost characters", nine of them had claimed sources, but on further investigation were not in the claimed sources or were data entry errors of similar characters in those sources, while three did not have any claimed sources, of which two were later found in other texts (and one of those is believed to be an error), and 彁 has never been located in any text predating its input into JIS C 6226. [1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97#%E5%85%B8%E6%8B%A0%E3%81%8C%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%8E%E3%81%AA%E3%82%82%E3%81%AE https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%BD%E9%9C%8A%E6%96%87%E5...

ineedasername 6y ago

I know, it's not really the same thing, but this reminded me of the RYRYRY test code used with Baudot at the beginning of teletype messages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code

neolog 6y ago

I've been wondering why there are subscripts for only 12 lowercase subscripts: ₐₑₒₓₔₕₖₗₘₙₚₛₜ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscripts_and_Subscripts_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscripts_and_Subscripts_(U... Anybody know the reason?

phonon 6y ago
It's used for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09028-n3571-upa-additions.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09028-n3571-upa-additions.p...
- neolog 6y ago
  Interesting, how did you figure that out?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    You can look up the characters in the database, they fall under "Subscripts for UPA".
0-_-0 6y ago
There's more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...

dialogbox 6y ago

> nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced Definitely the legend of this area is Korean[1]. Almost 95% (or even more) of characters have never been used and no one know how to pronounce it. Even from the first line of the blocks, I could find weird characters like 갅, 갌, 갍, 갎. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Syllables#Block https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Syllables#Block

lifthrasiir 6y ago
> Almost 95% (or even more) of characters have never been used and no one know how to pronounce it. This is absolutely false. KS X 1001, the primary character set for Hangul, contains 2,350 out of 11,172 (modern) syllables, which is definitely much larger than 5%. And that's not enough (KS X 1001 itself was heavily criticized for this), there are multiple secondary character sets got into Unicode; Unicode 1.1 had 6,656 arbitrarily ordered characters that were finally replaced by 11,172 neatly ordered characters by 2.0. They are real characters people use, my very old personal research [1] indicates that at least a half of them has legitimately appeared in the chat log for example. Pronunciation-wise, multiple consonant clusters in the final position indicate conditional pronunciation. "갅", for example, comprises of ㄱ g + ㅏ ah + ㄴ n + ㅈ j which is normally pronounced "gahn" by its own but "gahn-j" when followed by a vowel (e.g. "갅이" is pronounced "간지" gahn-ji). Phonetically Korean only has 7 possible codas and other final consonants exist because Korean orthography is a compromise between phoneticism and ideographicism and some words had to be adjusted to show their morphological roots. [1] https://j.mearie.org/post/24348147729/hangeul-usage-in-irc-chatting https://j.mearie.org/post/24348147729/hangeul-usage-in-irc-c... (in Korean)

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tony 6y ago

> Following the general adoption of the JIS standards these characters all made their way into Unicode This is the exact kind of place lost glyphs would find a home. The UNIHAN effort (which spans tons of sources) is very dedicated to cataloging these efforts. I run a few projects based around UNIHAN, which is geared toward cataloging glyphs that are variants, many of which are archaic and no longer used. Write up about UNIHAN: https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/unihan.html https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/unihan.html I have a tool to export Unicode's database of CJK characters to CSV, JSON, and so on: https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/ https://unihan-etl.git-pull.com/ Python library: https://cihai.git-pull.com/ https://cihai.git-pull.com/ CLI tool (compare to cjklib [1]): https://cihai-cli.git-pull.com/ https://cihai-cli.git-pull.com/ No knife / character decomposition. I'm working on it but the data is GPL'd: https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids/issues/65 https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids/issues/65

pkamb 6y ago

related: Did Burmese typewriters contain an upside-down character, which subsequently became proper typewriter style? https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/49653/did-burmese-typewriters-contain-an-upside-down-character-which-subsequently-bec https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/49653/did-burme...

HybridLightAI 6y ago

Computer viruses are usually deliberate and typically malicious. But spontaneous forms of computer life are possible. If enough of them are generated one of them might acquire the ability to reproduce. Then there is the possibility, however remote, of evolving a form of artificial intelligence.

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ngcc_hk 6y ago

Many of the original Hong Kong extension is for male and female sex organ used in Cantonese. They were there for court to write down what the gangster talk to each other exactly.

xg15 6y ago

> For example, 妛 was an error introduced while trying to record "山 over 女". "山 over 女" occurs in the name of a particular place and was thus suitable for inclusion in the JIS standard, but because they couldn't print it as one character yet, 山 and 女 were printed separately, cut out, and pasted onto a sheet of paper, and then copied. When reading the copy, the line where the two little pieces of paper met looked like a stroke and was added to the character by mistake. The original character (𡚴) was not added to JIS or Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe where ASCII was invented in asia and latin characters were not available until unicode was established: > For example, Ä was an error introduced while trying to record A below a dotted line. When reading the copy, the dotted line was added to the character by mistake. The original character (A) was not added to Unicode until much later and doesn't display on most sites for me.

mlok 6y ago

Slightly related : On French keyboards there is a key dedicated to the letter ù (u with an accent) which is used in one word only in the French language : "où" which means "where". ("ou" without an accent means "or", sql would be funny in French : SELECTIONNE * DE matable OÙ type='A' OU type='B' )

rurban 6y ago

The only spectres that are haunting Unicode still are U+3164 HANGUL FILLER and U+ffa0 HALFWIDTH HANGUL FILLER, which are not whitespace but valid ID_Start and ID_Continue chars. Zerowidth whitespace as identifiers are illegal. eg https://github.com/jagracey/Awesome-Unicode#user-content-variable-identifiers-can-effectively-include-whitespace https://github.com/jagracey/Awesome-Unicode#user-content-var... These unused glyphs on the post are harmless, because unused.