5 ms·

The Latin alphabet being boring, I spent some time going through ancient alphabets included in Unicode. It gets pretty trippy, pretty quick. As in "We don't h

by ethbr0 4y ago

The Latin alphabet being boring, I spent some time going through ancient alphabets included in Unicode. It gets pretty trippy, pretty quick. As in "We don't have a clear idea what this rune was for, or what it means, but we see it in documents and so added it to Unicode." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_(Unicode_block) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_(Unicode_block)

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> As in "We don't have a clear idea what this rune was for, or what it means, but we see it in documents and so added it to Unicode." Documents? I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. A rune we only know by its occurrence in documents would be far more interesting for the existence of a document than it would be for its own sake! Compare what the page about Anglo-Saxon runes says about the corpus: > The Old English and Old Frisian Runic Inscriptions database project at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany aims at collecting the genuine corpus of Old English inscriptions containing more than two runes in its paper edition, while the electronic edition aims at including both genuine and doubtful inscriptions down to single-rune inscriptions. > The corpus of the paper edition encompasses about one hundred objects (including stone slabs, stone crosses, bones, rings, brooches, weapons, urns, a writing tablet, tweezers, a sun-dial,[clarification needed] comb, bracteates, caskets, a font, dishes, and graffiti). The database includes, in addition, 16 inscriptions containing a single rune, several runic coins, and 8 cases of dubious runic characters (runelike signs, possible Latin characters, weathered characters). Comprising fewer than 200 inscriptions, the corpus is slightly larger than that of Continental Elder Futhark (about 80 inscriptions, c. 400–700), but slightly smaller than that of the Scandinavian Elder Futhark (about 260 inscriptions, c. 200–800). So across every runic system we know, we have under 600 texts, all of those texts are short inscriptions, and even to reach that number of samples we need to include texts that we aren't even sure contain any runes.
- gumby 4y ago
  > Documents? I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. One of the original goals of Unicode was to be able to computerize every document. I still have some old linguistics books in which characters have been handwritten into typed or even typeset text. So these are the types of documents being referred to: academic papers. Some fancy books have photographs of ancient writing; I’m not sure if Unicode tries to encode such sources and I pretty much doubt it (how would you even know what to call the symbols? You touch on this in your comment). However often they are attached to treatises that order the characters in some way (I.e. index an alphabet) in which case the first case above would apply. In other words: thanks to some scholars who wrote down and ordered runic alphabets, you can now discuss runes with your friends and colleagues through email.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > One of the original goals of Unicode was to be able to computerize every document. I still have some old linguistics books in which characters have been handwritten into typed or even typeset text. That's a weird goal for Unicode to have. We've already accomplished that; a PDF file does the job better (note: PDF documents already support every character existing in the past, present, or future!) while being less complex.
    - gumby 4y ago
      I don’t understand. If there is no computerized way to represent the script, all you can do would be to include photographs in your pdf. The point of computerization is not simply storage and retrieval (and retrieval is hard if you can’t represent the script) but automated processing, which is meaningless if you can’t represent any semantics). Separately, PDF felt like a step backwards on the day it was announced and sadly nothing since then has changed that.
    - CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
      How do you search for non-unicode characters in a pdf document?
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        How do you search for them in a book?
        gpderetta 4y ago
        ctrl-F once you have digitized it.
        jen20 4y ago
        And how do you type the character you are searching for?
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  >Documents? I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. If a clay tablet counts, why not a runestone?
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    I'm not knocking runestones for being the wrong medium. I'm knocking them for not being documents. A typical cuneiform record might be analogized to an invoice for delivery of a crate of shirts or whatever. (And of course we also have textbooks, dictionaries, literature, correspondence, business reports, mathematical treatises, and every other type of written work.) A typical runic record would be more like the text "Made in Taiwan" printed on the shirt labels. One of the biggest problems in the study of these cultures is that they left no written records. We know they had a writing system, the runes, but as far as we can tell they almost never used it for anything. Quite the opposite is true of Mesopotamian cultures, where we're buried in more records than we have the manpower to translate.
    - hprotagonist 4y ago
      I suppose it also matters what you think a rune is. Does futhork count? There's parchment with that written on it. Elder Futhark, none as far as i know.
- bombcar 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWWFLI5kFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWWFLI5kFU describes another side-effect of encoding old scripts/runes.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  > I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. There are. Such documents are called runestones and thousands survive to this day, most in Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runestone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runestone
  - eesmith 4y ago
    Huh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document says: > Documents are also distinguished from "realia", which are three-dimensional objects that would otherwise satisfy the definition of "document" because they memorialize or represent thought; documents are considered more as 2-dimensional representations. I think "realia" - a term I had never heard before - describes runestones better than "document".
- yorwba 4y ago
  Runes continued to be used long past the Elder Futhark period and from the medieval period manuscripts survive that fit the modern conception of a "document", most famously the Codex Runicus https://www.e-pages.dk/ku/579/html5/ https://www.e-pages.dk/ku/579/html5/ (202 pages)
shantara 4y ago
My favorite Unicode glyph is Multiocular O (ꙮ). There is only one recorded usage, by a 15th century russian monk, who decided to use it in phrase “many-eyed seraphim” instead of two regular letters ‘o’. So of course it was added to Unicode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O
- lmkg 4y ago
  It gets better: this glyph is bugged. Somehow, the guy responsible for adding it to Unicode somehow got the number of eyes wrong. Per his description, Unicode fonts represent it with 7 eyes, but after getting called out on Twitter he realized the original manuscript shows 10 eyes. This bug will be fixed in Unicode 15.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
    Achieving peak Byzantium there, I guess.
  - corrral 4y ago
    What about modern uses of the character that specifically intended 7 eyes? Unicode needs to add a time or (worse, but probably OK) version datum to glyphs or glyph ranges, I suppose (applying it only at the document level wouldn't suffice, as in the case of quoting).
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Going to the release note pdf, it will "expand" to 10 eyes by adding one more to the end of each horizontal row (if people are curious).
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  This one has sat in the back of my head for a long time. I wonder if any of the little ligatures or strange letter variations people write today could be preserved in the same way, or if the shorthand systems could be.
phlogisticfugu 4y ago
It's because unicode was defined by Tolkien fans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_(Unicode_block)#cite_note-26 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_(Unicode_block)#cite_n...

by ethbr0 4y ago

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> As in "We don't have a clear idea what this rune was for, or what it means, but we see it in documents and so added it to Unicode." Documents? I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. A rune we only know by its occurrence in documents would be far more interesting for the existence of a document than it would be for its own sake! Compare what the page about Anglo-Saxon runes says about the corpus: > The Old English and Old Frisian Runic Inscriptions database project at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany aims at collecting the genuine corpus of Old English inscriptions containing more than two runes in its paper edition, while the electronic edition aims at including both genuine and doubtful inscriptions down to single-rune inscriptions. > The corpus of the paper edition encompasses about one hundred objects (including stone slabs, stone crosses, bones, rings, brooches, weapons, urns, a writing tablet, tweezers, a sun-dial,[clarification needed] comb, bracteates, caskets, a font, dishes, and graffiti). The database includes, in addition, 16 inscriptions containing a single rune, several runic coins, and 8 cases of dubious runic characters (runelike signs, possible Latin characters, weathered characters). Comprising fewer than 200 inscriptions, the corpus is slightly larger than that of Continental Elder Futhark (about 80 inscriptions, c. 400–700), but slightly smaller than that of the Scandinavian Elder Futhark (about 260 inscriptions, c. 200–800). So across every runic system we know, we have under 600 texts, all of those texts are short inscriptions, and even to reach that number of samples we need to include texts that we aren't even sure contain any runes.

gumby 4y ago
> Documents? I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. One of the original goals of Unicode was to be able to computerize every document. I still have some old linguistics books in which characters have been handwritten into typed or even typeset text. So these are the types of documents being referred to: academic papers. Some fancy books have photographs of ancient writing; I’m not sure if Unicode tries to encode such sources and I pretty much doubt it (how would you even know what to call the symbols? You touch on this in your comment). However often they are attached to treatises that order the characters in some way (I.e. index an alphabet) in which case the first case above would apply. In other words: thanks to some scholars who wrote down and ordered runic alphabets, you can now discuss runes with your friends and colleagues through email.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > One of the original goals of Unicode was to be able to computerize every document. I still have some old linguistics books in which characters have been handwritten into typed or even typeset text. That's a weird goal for Unicode to have. We've already accomplished that; a PDF file does the job better (note: PDF documents already support every character existing in the past, present, or future!) while being less complex.
  - gumby 4y ago
    I don’t understand. If there is no computerized way to represent the script, all you can do would be to include photographs in your pdf. The point of computerization is not simply storage and retrieval (and retrieval is hard if you can’t represent the script) but automated processing, which is meaningless if you can’t represent any semantics). Separately, PDF felt like a step backwards on the day it was announced and sadly nothing since then has changed that.
  - CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
    How do you search for non-unicode characters in a pdf document?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      How do you search for them in a book?
      - gpderetta 4y ago
        ctrl-F once you have digitized it.
        jen20 4y ago
        And how do you type the character you are searching for?
hprotagonist 4y ago
>Documents? I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. If a clay tablet counts, why not a runestone?
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  I'm not knocking runestones for being the wrong medium. I'm knocking them for not being documents. A typical cuneiform record might be analogized to an invoice for delivery of a crate of shirts or whatever. (And of course we also have textbooks, dictionaries, literature, correspondence, business reports, mathematical treatises, and every other type of written work.) A typical runic record would be more like the text "Made in Taiwan" printed on the shirt labels. One of the biggest problems in the study of these cultures is that they left no written records. We know they had a writing system, the runes, but as far as we can tell they almost never used it for anything. Quite the opposite is true of Mesopotamian cultures, where we're buried in more records than we have the manpower to translate.
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    I suppose it also matters what you think a rune is. Does futhork count? There's parchment with that written on it. Elder Futhark, none as far as i know.
bombcar 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWWFLI5kFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWWFLI5kFU describes another side-effect of encoding old scripts/runes.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
> I had the strong impression that there are no documents written in runes. There are. Such documents are called runestones and thousands survive to this day, most in Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runestone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runestone
- eesmith 4y ago
  Huh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document says: > Documents are also distinguished from "realia", which are three-dimensional objects that would otherwise satisfy the definition of "document" because they memorialize or represent thought; documents are considered more as 2-dimensional representations. I think "realia" - a term I had never heard before - describes runestones better than "document".
yorwba 4y ago
Runes continued to be used long past the Elder Futhark period and from the medieval period manuscripts survive that fit the modern conception of a "document", most famously the Codex Runicus https://www.e-pages.dk/ku/579/html5/ https://www.e-pages.dk/ku/579/html5/ (202 pages)

shantara 4y ago

My favorite Unicode glyph is Multiocular O (ꙮ). There is only one recorded usage, by a 15th century russian monk, who decided to use it in phrase “many-eyed seraphim” instead of two regular letters ‘o’. So of course it was added to Unicode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O

lmkg 4y ago
It gets better: this glyph is bugged. Somehow, the guy responsible for adding it to Unicode somehow got the number of eyes wrong. Per his description, Unicode fonts represent it with 7 eyes, but after getting called out on Twitter he realized the original manuscript shows 10 eyes. This bug will be fixed in Unicode 15.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  Achieving peak Byzantium there, I guess.
- corrral 4y ago
  What about modern uses of the character that specifically intended 7 eyes? Unicode needs to add a time or (worse, but probably OK) version datum to glyphs or glyph ranges, I suppose (applying it only at the document level wouldn't suffice, as in the case of quoting).
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Going to the release note pdf, it will "expand" to 10 eyes by adding one more to the end of each horizontal row (if people are curious).
shadowofneptune 4y ago
This one has sat in the back of my head for a long time. I wonder if any of the little ligatures or strange letter variations people write today could be preserved in the same way, or if the shorthand systems could be.

phlogisticfugu 4y ago

It's because unicode was defined by Tolkien fans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_(Unicode_block)#cite_note-26 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_(Unicode_block)#cite_n...