5 ms·

These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. How did it we end up with so many characters of unknown origin? I

These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. How did it we end up with so many characters of unknown origin? I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project. (I still have no idea, nor can supply an example of the symbol in use.) […] it is the case that ISO 9573-13 existed long before either AFII or the STIX project were formed. […] I once asked Charles Goldfarb what the source of these entities was, but remember that he didn’t have a definitive answer.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. I worked at a large media company that had lots of differing icon sets in play across different media. These icons were in SVG and they had been optimized pretty intensely. In some cases due to a bug in one of the optimizing tools some types of bezier curves got weird, so instead of say the round headed person with their hand held up to say stop it was the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens. Because of how the icons were used and not used these optimized errors were actually sitting around so long that nobody had examples of the original icons although one could guess because in some cases we had similar ones in other projects that had not been optimized. So maybe a similar thing would be the source of these weird alien entities.
- tclancy 5y ago
  >the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens That sounds like a useful reaction/ response these days.
  - HNHatesUsers 5y ago
- imglorp 5y ago
  Well, Klingon [edit, was proposed] for Unicode. Maybe someone imported some 70s scifi orthography, just because.
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    Not yet. Even the 2021 request [1] to remove Klingon from the Not The Roadmap list [2] is in hiatus. [1] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/not-the-roadmap/ https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/not-the-roadmap/ [2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21155-klingon-req.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21155-klingon-req.pdf
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    Did it? It was proposed a few times; did the last proposal actually land?
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Klingon made it into Unicode. No it did not. Klingon was originally proposed in 1997 and rejected in 2001. A second proposal was made in 2016 with more optimistic noises. But AFAIK it has yet to be accepted. It is also, like Tengwar and Cirth (which AFAIK remain unincluded even though they are on the BMP roadmap), held back on IP grounds. To my knowledge, the IP issues remain fully unresolved. Klingon is included in the ConScript registry, but that is unrelated to unicode itself, it performs ad-hoc and non-standard allocations in private use areas.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      ConScript seems to have been semi-replaced by the Under-ConScript: https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/ https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/
- bamboozled 5y ago
  I would've thought they'd have a table of every icon and a description or something, maybe at the time it was never taken very seriously or likely to take off as it did, so people didn't bother. Like IPv4...
- buescher 5y ago
  >star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens Could someone please feed that to DALL-E?
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Every post and Tweet on the Net now includes this exact reply by someone. What monster hath we unleashed?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - CyanBird 5y ago
    Listen, I would if I could, that invite list must be huuuge by now, that or go mighty slow
- HNHatesUsers 5y ago
somedude895 5y ago
> Notably, it appears that anyone could register a glyph with the AFII for a fee of 5$ to 50$ (about 8.60$ to 86$, accounting for inflation). Even if the International Glyph Register can be found, it likely merely contains another table with the glyph, the indentifier, and the short description. To know its origins would require the original registration request that added the character, but it’s unlikely that such old documents from a now-defunct non-profit organization in the 90s would have been kept or digitized. Could be any random kid who found out about this and wanted the cool symbol they made up registered.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  In some sense, you can still do! The Ideographic Variation Database [1] essentially allows a definition of new CJK ideograph [sic] as a glyphic subset of existing characters, with a possible processing fee. [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/ https://unicode.org/ivd/
rcarmo 5y ago
I suspect there's an entire alien alphabet (like Marain, for instance) in there someplace. There was a proposal to stuff Klingon into the Private Use Area, at least...
- speed_spread 5y ago
  If you're willing to use a discontinuous subset you could probably find close enough glyphs to make a full Marain. Ordering would be messed up and require a lookup table though.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I assumed W.A.S.T.E. were behind them. (Might need to add this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49)
dicytea 5y ago
Something similar exists in JIS called 幽霊文字 (ghost characters), which refers to kanji of mysterious origin with no real-world usage that somehow made its way into the JIS character set. After some investigation, most of them turns out to be mistranscriptions of kanji from old historical materials.
- DavidVoid 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208#Kanji_from_unknown_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208#Kanji_from_unknown_... Due to this thorough investigation, the committee was able to pare down the number of kanji for which the source cannot be confidently explained to twelve, shown on the adjacent table. Of these, it is conjectured that several glyphs came about due to copying errors. In particular, 妛 was probably created when printers tried to create 𡚴 by cutting and pasting 山 and 女 together. A shadow from that process was misinterpreted as a line, resulting in 妛 (a picture of this can be found in the Jōyō kanji jiten).
dirtyid 5y ago
I remember convincing friend to build unicode pokedex extension that collected all the unicode symbol he was exposed to via cansual web browsing. Never followed up but I think it'd be neat, or something along the lines of rare unicode browser bingo.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. I worked at a large media company that had lots of differing icon sets in play across different media. These icons were in SVG and they had been optimized pretty intensely. In some cases due to a bug in one of the optimizing tools some types of bezier curves got weird, so instead of say the round headed person with their hand held up to say stop it was the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens. Because of how the icons were used and not used these optimized errors were actually sitting around so long that nobody had examples of the original icons although one could guess because in some cases we had similar ones in other projects that had not been optimized. So maybe a similar thing would be the source of these weird alien entities.

tclancy 5y ago
>the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens That sounds like a useful reaction/ response these days.
- HNHatesUsers 5y ago
imglorp 5y ago
Well, Klingon [edit, was proposed] for Unicode. Maybe someone imported some 70s scifi orthography, just because.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Not yet. Even the 2021 request [1] to remove Klingon from the Not The Roadmap list [2] is in hiatus. [1] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/not-the-roadmap/ https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/not-the-roadmap/ [2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21155-klingon-req.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21155-klingon-req.pdf
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Did it? It was proposed a few times; did the last proposal actually land?
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Klingon made it into Unicode. No it did not. Klingon was originally proposed in 1997 and rejected in 2001. A second proposal was made in 2016 with more optimistic noises. But AFAIK it has yet to be accepted. It is also, like Tengwar and Cirth (which AFAIK remain unincluded even though they are on the BMP roadmap), held back on IP grounds. To my knowledge, the IP issues remain fully unresolved. Klingon is included in the ConScript registry, but that is unrelated to unicode itself, it performs ad-hoc and non-standard allocations in private use areas.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    ConScript seems to have been semi-replaced by the Under-ConScript: https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/ https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/
bamboozled 5y ago
I would've thought they'd have a table of every icon and a description or something, maybe at the time it was never taken very seriously or likely to take off as it did, so people didn't bother. Like IPv4...
buescher 5y ago
>star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens Could someone please feed that to DALL-E?
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Every post and Tweet on the Net now includes this exact reply by someone. What monster hath we unleashed?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Listen, I would if I could, that invite list must be huuuge by now, that or go mighty slow
HNHatesUsers 5y ago

somedude895 5y ago

> Notably, it appears that anyone could register a glyph with the AFII for a fee of 5$ to 50$ (about 8.60$ to 86$, accounting for inflation). Even if the International Glyph Register can be found, it likely merely contains another table with the glyph, the indentifier, and the short description. To know its origins would require the original registration request that added the character, but it’s unlikely that such old documents from a now-defunct non-profit organization in the 90s would have been kept or digitized. Could be any random kid who found out about this and wanted the cool symbol they made up registered.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
In some sense, you can still do! The Ideographic Variation Database [1] essentially allows a definition of new CJK ideograph [sic] as a glyphic subset of existing characters, with a possible processing fee. [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/ https://unicode.org/ivd/

rcarmo 5y ago

I suspect there's an entire alien alphabet (like Marain, for instance) in there someplace. There was a proposal to stuff Klingon into the Private Use Area, at least...

speed_spread 5y ago
If you're willing to use a discontinuous subset you could probably find close enough glyphs to make a full Marain. Ordering would be messed up and require a lookup table though.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

I assumed W.A.S.T.E. were behind them. (Might need to add this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49)

dicytea 5y ago

Something similar exists in JIS called 幽霊文字 (ghost characters), which refers to kanji of mysterious origin with no real-world usage that somehow made its way into the JIS character set. After some investigation, most of them turns out to be mistranscriptions of kanji from old historical materials.

DavidVoid 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208#Kanji_from_unknown_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208#Kanji_from_unknown_... Due to this thorough investigation, the committee was able to pare down the number of kanji for which the source cannot be confidently explained to twelve, shown on the adjacent table. Of these, it is conjectured that several glyphs came about due to copying errors. In particular, 妛 was probably created when printers tried to create 𡚴 by cutting and pasting 山 and 女 together. A shadow from that process was misinterpreted as a line, resulting in 妛 (a picture of this can be found in the Jōyō kanji jiten).

dirtyid 5y ago

I remember convincing friend to build unicode pokedex extension that collected all the unicode symbol he was exposed to via cansual web browsing. Never followed up but I think it'd be neat, or something along the lines of rare unicode browser bingo.