44 ms·

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

372 points by SerCe 4y ago

dmz73 4y ago
And then people wander why software developers don't care to support Unicode properly. First 60,000+ characters made sense, than few more were needed and Unicode suddenly got to play with a 1,000,000+ and just went off the rails.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  You can support Unicode without ever having to display all possible characters "correctly".
kratom_sandwich 4y ago
I love this character and I love the fact that is being updated. Just to get this right: at some point some person chose to doodle the letter instead of writing it the correct way and now we have a corresponding Unicode character? Sort of amazing and it also makes you think ...
- lmkg 4y ago
  There was a... "tradition" is a strong word, perhaps "trend" is better. Authors making copies of the Bible or related works in Cyrillic, that the letter O (equivalent to Roman O) at the beginning of the word for "eye" would be stylized to look like an eye. There are a variety of glyphs along these lines: Ꙩ, Ꙫ, Ꙭ. All of them, including ꙮ, were added to Unicode as a single group. The glyph "ꙮ" was used to refer to an Angel with a whole buncha eyeballs, as one does. In terms of texts that survive today, this specific glyph has exactly one use in a single manuscript from the 1400's. It might have been used more, in texts which don't survive. But it is part of a larger trend, and I bet that its inclusion in Unicode depends strongly on that. But yeah, in itself the ꙮ character exists solely so that modern computers are capable of a more-faithful rendition of the transcription of a single handwritten copy of the Book of Psalms.
  - happytoexplain 4y ago
    Thank you for describing the missing context. I couldn't understand why this stylized letter deserved a code point more than the uncountable others. I don't necessarily agree still, but the fact that this character was only unique within a larger trend makes it much more reasonable.
  - henriquecm8 4y ago
    So you are saying that the glyph is now more biblically accurate?
    - int_19h 4y ago
      The Bible doesn't specify how many eyes seraphim have. "In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. ... Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings."
  - cyral 4y ago
    > modern computers are capable of a more-faithful rendition of the transcription of a single handwritten copy of the Book of Psalms. I wonder if there is even a copy of the book transcribed to actual characters or if it only exists as scanned PDF copies? If anyone did transcribe it, would they have any knowledge that the ꙮ character even exists on computers?
  - vintermann 4y ago
    Hah, and here I thought I was making a joke when I called it a biblically accurate O!
  - caf 4y ago
    "meme"
- Arnt 4y ago
  I attended a Unicode meeting (or maybe two? not sure?) and came away with the impression that Unicode is like those open source projects that are used by half of the world and maintained by a handful of skilled and benevolent people. In Unicode's case I think most of them are paid, at least.
  - shp0ngle 4y ago
    That is what I understood too. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to add new letters to Unicode too if you try a bit. However that is a bit harder with emojis, that have their own subcommittee, which seem to be more bureaucratic and also more popular than the rest of Unicode. Everyone wants to make a new emoji.
- cillian64 4y ago
  It does raise interesting questions about what counts as decoration/formatting and what counts as part of the actual text. You could view these ocular O characters as purely decorative (like the fancy first character in a paragraph) but they could also be seem as a quirk of spelling which should be represented in unicode. But the multiocular O really does seem like one monk got bored one time and did some doodling.
sshine 4y ago
(┛ꙮДꙮ)┛彡┻━┻
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  cant unsee
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Don't worry, you'll forget about this one when it gets six more eyes.
- SnooSux 4y ago
  Be not afraid
  - drewzero1 4y ago
    Bee not afraid?
    - msla 4y ago
      Bee Nut Afraid. (When an apiarist is terrified.)
- thechao 4y ago
  ┬─┬ノ( ꙮ _ ꙮノ)
- loudmax 4y ago
  ꙮ> === The James Webb Space Telescope.
etamponi 4y ago
By the same reasoning, the 7-eyed O has now been used more than once, so it deserves a glyph! So the right way to do this is to introduce a new character for the correct glyph, and also leave the current one (perhaps changing the title). Otherwise these tweets won't make when read by someone that updated to Unicode 15.0
- jotato 4y ago
  My thought as well
- baybal2 4y ago
  Unicode basic rule is that character definitions never ever change, even when enumerated erroneously.
  - Arnt 4y ago
    Yes, but this is a change either way, because that codepoint's definition referred to that character. Either the reference or the description of the appearance has to change.
    - echelon 4y ago
      ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ Make a new character. Updating the existing character ruins the meaning of all previous usages. It's like trying to change an API. Don't disrespect your existing users. Make a new version. (ꙮ ͜ʖꙮ) Think of all the ASCII art this botches. That has to have some historical importance to the Unicode standards body. (⌐ꙮ_ꙮ) For scholarly digital (unprinted) documents where the correct character rendering matters, erroneous past usages can be trivially found with grep, a date search, and easily corrected. The domain experts will familiarize themselves with this issue and fix the problem. Don't take a shotgun to it! This message wꙮn't have the ꙮriginally intended meaning if the characters are updated from underneath. ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ
- koboll 4y ago
  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.
xanathar 4y ago
So it's a Unicode character that represents a... blob with 10 eyes? Hordes of Wizards of the Coast lawyers getting ready for the big fight
- gedy 4y ago
  Name checks out: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Xanathar_(original) https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Xanathar_(original)
- supernewton 4y ago
  Nah, Beholders have 11 eyes, so we're good here.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    I feel like the spelling should be updated to Behꙮlders, or better yet, BehꙨꙮlders, to reflect that (of course, this would only make sense once the glyph update actually hits).
xashor 4y ago
Too bad I have to adjust my business cards for ꙮ.world
lordnacho 4y ago
Wait a minute, how will we refer to the old glyph in the future? Once this is updated the articles such as this one will have the new shape.
- martin_a 4y ago
  "The character formely known as U+A66E"
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  There was a joke that U+A66E should retain seven eyes and further eyes should be added with a ZWJ sequence [1]. If that character somehow got very popular in modern texts, updating its glyph may result in an interoperability problem so such solution would have been needed. But that didn't happen so the glyph itself has been updated instead. [1] https://twitter.com/BabelStone/status/1323440365429542919 https://twitter.com/BabelStone/status/1323440365429542919
jerf 4y ago
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 world of the non-imaginary, we accept that a Unicode character with a hundred eyes is not practical and we accept the representation with just a few eyes, but generally agree that upgrading to 7 to 10 is a nice improvement, as 7 does not evenly divide into 100 but 10 does. This is important, because... reasons.
- sshine 4y ago
  From "The House of Asterion" by Jorge Luis Borges: "It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are infinite) (footnote: The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite.) are open day and night to men and to animals as well." https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house_of_asterion.pdf https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house...
  - Eddonarth 4y ago
    That reminds me of the Nahuatl word centzon, which is used to mean either 400, or an innumerable/infinite number. The Aztecs used a base-20 number system, so 400 = 20*20. https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/10/the-centzon-totochtin-the-innumerable-divine-rabbits-mexico https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/10/t...
- tempodox 4y ago
  “Santa Clause” would translate to “holy clause”. There might be such a thing but I think you meant Santa Claus :)
  - dtparr 4y ago
    Maybe just a big fan of the Tim Allen movie?
rafaelturk 4y ago
Finally!
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
- remedan 4y ago
  We do have a Unicode character for a gun: U+1F52B PISTOL. Most fonts that have it choose to style it as a water gun, though.
- dafoex 4y ago
  There's an emoji for handgun, but Apple and other big tech decided it needed to be a water gun. There is also a rifle character intended to represent the sport of shooting in a pentathlon, but again Apple threw its weight around and, while the character became codified in Unicode, it never became an emoji and no font from big tech supports it.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I guess because the goal of Unicode is to be able to represent every character that's appeared in language. This one is in a published book, while guns and a sexual intercourse symbol aren't. Emoji was a weird value add that Japanese mobile providers added to their phones before Unicode. To get them to move to Unicode, they had to keep them. That's why there's a Tokyo Tower emoji, but not an Eiffel Tower. That's why the post office has a 〒 on it. That people get any use out of emoji outside of Japan is really pure luck.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I've even heard emoji referred to as "the carrot that keeps the implementations current." Every time a new version of Unicode is published, a few more emoji are tacked on. It acts as incentive for all the cellphone carriers and such to put the money into updating their implementations, because nobody wants to be the one on the block with the one phone that can't render "Mirror Ball" . (ETA: LOL, Hacker News drops "Mirror Ball" https://emojipedia.org/mirror-ball/ https://emojipedia.org/mirror-ball/ from the comment when you post)
    - 4y ago
rizoma_dev 4y ago
I'm always happy to see some esoteric unicode updates
diimdeep 4y ago
Here[1][2] is the scan of manuscript from 1429, image #251 [1] https://lib-fond.ru/lib-rgb/304-i/f-304i-308/#image-251 https://lib-fond.ru/lib-rgb/304-i/f-304i-308/#image-251 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927102700/https://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/medium.php?col=1&manuscript=308&pagefile=308-0249 https://web.archive.org/web/20110927102700/https://www.stsl....
- klyrs 4y ago
  It's curious that the red ink blobs behind the "eyes" aren't included in the unicode glyph either...
- aasasd 4y ago
  So the text at that point literally talks about ‘many-eyes seraphims’. The eyes symbol is a pure gag—seems to be spliced in place of the letter ‘о’ in the word ‘eye’ just a little down the line. (However, Old Slavonic is a tough read due to no spaces, so I'm not sure about that word. But at least it's not the Glagolitic script, which was just ridiculous and actually had multi-circle letters.)
  - chickenimprint 4y ago
    As far as I can tell it swallows up the preceding го. It seems to be preceded by other jocular glyphs among scribes. A regular o received a central dot when writing the word "eye": ꙩ Words containing "two" or "both" had an o replaced by two conjoined os: ꚙ It is only natural to carry on the in-joke for the dual and plural "eyes" like this: ꙭ Our scribe simply got a little excited, following the pattern to it's logical end point in the term "many-eyed"
- nashashmi 4y ago
  Looks more like a diagram in the middle of text. It's very unique. It should not be a character
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    It's used in place of the letter "o", so not purely a diagram but it feels like the role of a font to me, not a dedicated character.
politelemon 4y ago
Here's the original tweet where the discrepancy was noticed in 2020, and a photograph of a page inside the book where it's used: https://twitter.com/etiennefd/status/1322673792452354048 https://twitter.com/etiennefd/status/1322673792452354048
hulitu 4y ago
> Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated I fear this will lead to a lot of "bug fixes and performance improvements" in Android. /s
Stamp01 4y ago
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.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's been seen once in the in-print wild. There's no way to know how many since-written documents will break if a whole codepoint is dropped.
- bogwog 4y ago
  Imagine you’re a historian from the future studying some old document, and you spot a weird character that you’ve never seen before. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to search for that character to see if it shows up in any other document? A simple OCR scan will bring up all the information you could ever need for that one weird symbol.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Perhaps it's relevant to look at how it was introduced - as a "package deal" with many, many characters from medieval cyrillic literature, as described in this proposal https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07003r-n3194r-cyrillic.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07003r-n3194r-cyrillic.pdf It certainly made sense to include this package in Unicode, and the vast majority of those characters certainly should be in this proposal. You do have to draw the line somewhere, and obviously those close to the line will be debatable, no matter where you chose to draw it, like this particular symbol - but once you've decided that you will include the one-eyed O (small and capital) and the two-eyed O (small and capital), then putting in the many-eyed O as well to complete the set doesn't seem so far-fetched.
- 1-6 4y ago
  I agree with your mindset. It’s time for a unicode replacement.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  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 still received code points because they are considered essential for digitaization of historical works, and multiocular O is no different.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
I want to be that person that has so much time on their hand they can afford to waste it on pointless things like this.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  There's a career path to get there. It involves becoming someone who cares deeply about the ways and means of digitizing data stored in analog media. Drill down deep enough, and you'll find yourself in a fascinating world of coding an error. There are things like the "ghost characters," which are codepoints in Japanese that map to characters that were basically transcription errors when the team was putting together a full set of Kanji. Some characters with an extra horizontal line snuck into the set; they were likely caused by a transcription error because the character got split onto two pieces of paper by lines of text being copy-pasted into a records book, and the shadow cast by the thin extra layer of paper was misinterpreted as another stroke. https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
memorable 4y ago
Alternative frontend version: https://nitter.net/jonty/status/1571615998335123457 https://nitter.net/jonty/status/1571615998335123457
diimdeep 4y ago
Being stuck on macOS Catalina with Unicode 12, I think there is a way to upgrade to newer versions and get new emoji support [1][2] [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/278937/is-there-a-way-to-update-the-emoji-font https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/278937/is-there-a-... [2] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emoji-picker.2260530/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...
xenonite 4y ago
Sadly, ꙮ is not eligible for engraving by Apple on AirPods.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  As of right now, it's available for "adoption": https://www.unicode.org/consortium/adopt-a-character.html https://www.unicode.org/consortium/adopt-a-character.html
baltimore 4y ago
Is there any end to this? E.g., why not include Galileo's pictograms of Saturn as seen here: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00004p https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
- caf 4y ago
  Galileo's pictograms aren't being used as a letter, though: they're explicitly a diagram (I believe he says "like this: <picture>").
perihelions 4y ago
Related thread, about non-existent CJK characters ending up in Unicode through transcription mistakes ("ghost characters"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095502 ("A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode", 180 comments) edit to add: The top thread in the 2020 repost was about ꙮ, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955536
vintermann 4y ago
Biblically accurate O?
BearOso 4y ago
And its new official name shall be the Trypophobigon.
dhosek 4y ago
This is not exactly a correct description. Unicode does not specify the appearance of characters, only their meaning. It seems what’s changed is the reference presentation of the character in the Unicode tables, not the character itself. Unicode goes to great lengths to preserve backwards compatibility so changing the meaning of a code point would violate that principle. Your OS or application providing Unicode 15.0.0 support will not change the appearance of U+A66E. The appearance is dependent on the font.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Meanwhile I check back every now and again on MUFI (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative) [1] and it's still not in. [1]: https://mufi.info https://mufi.info
wheybags 4y ago
This kind of stupid thing is my problem with Unicode. We have all this baggage for stuff that nobody uses, and we need to deal with it forever. The worst for me is the way there is no possible way to encode a grapheme cluster as a constant size, so using Unicode make it impossible to have simple character access like an old style c string, no matter how big you make your char, even though it's totally possible with damn near every language that people actually use. So then we all end up paying this massive complexity tax everywhere to pay for support for some Mongolian script that died out 200 years ago (or multi codepoint encodings of simple things like é - just why, it was so avoidable).
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I hear you. I loathe working with Unicode for this exact reason. It's a bit of a nightmare due to its complexity. That said, what it's trying to do is enormously complex.
- mkipper 4y ago
  Before Unicode, everyone who came up with a character encoding scheme probably thought their system was good enough for any reasonable use-case. But they all had limitations that made them inadequate for things less obscure than representing some dead Mongolian language. It would be nice if we could come up with some magical system that optimally encodes all the text that "matters" and ignores everything else, but history has shown that to be very hard. So we're left with Unicode, which takes the approach of giving us (effectively) infinite code points to represent characters, with (effectively) infinite ways to visually represent them. That does lead to a bunch of "unnecessary" baggage and headaches, but it also solves a bunch of real problems that you probably don't know exist. Unicode is a pain in the ass, but it's a solution to a very hard problem. You can feel free to design your own solution, but you'll probably run head-first into all the problems Unicode was trying to solve from 40 years ago.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  I'm getting the impression that this is only "obvious" from a latin-cyrillic-greek alphabet point of view ? P.S.: Also, even for those, it would seem that one of the big reasons for things like combining characters was added to Unicode in order to be backwards compatible even with mutually incompatible encodings ?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
Am I alone in thinking that this is not so much a separate character, as a doodle a bored monk made to relieve a tiny bit of the tedium of copying manuscripts?
idlewords 4y ago
They should put in a few additional eyes as hot spares.
hidudeurcool 4y ago
Waterluvian 4y ago
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-desired subsets?
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  > 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-desired subsets? You can't, and you are not expected to do so. You are limited by OpenType limit (65,535 glyphs), various shaping rules that possibly increase the number of required glyphs, and lack of local or historical typographic convention. Your best bet is either to recruit a large number of experts (e.g. Google Noto fonts) or to significantly sacrifice quality (e.g. GNU Unifont).
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I wasn’t aware of the 2^16 limitation. Thank you for the notes!
  - poizan42 4y ago
    A single OpenType font file is limited to 65,535 glyphs. Nothing stops your font from being implemented as a series of .otf files (besides what people think of as a "font" when it comes to usage on computers). But yes, time constraints are the limiting factor. I don't think anyone is going to dedicate their entire life to making a single font.
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      While you are right that one logical font can consist of multiple font files (or possibly a OpenType collection), this constraint does affect most typical fonts, and in particular wide-coverage CJK fonts already hit this limit. Fonts supporting only one of Chinese, Japanese and Korean don't need that many glyphs, and probably even two of them will be okay, but fonts with all three sets of glyphs won't. It is therefore common to provide three versions of fonts, all differently named.
no-reply 4y ago
ꙮ I'll check back in the future.
pippy 4y ago
The Unicode can be ridiculous at times. It contains a character used once in a single manuscript in a extinct language, but not a standardized glyph for an external URL link.
msoad 4y ago
This is similar to "man in business suit levitating" emoji. How this stuff make it to Unicode?!
- octoberfranklin 4y ago
  I miss the good old days when character sets didn't feel the need for annual updates.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  Levitating man is just an unicode encoding of an old Webdings (or windings?) font. There was an accepted proposal to add many windings and webdings letters as unicode endpoints. Thus, levitating man in a suit.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Crazy that it renders in HN comments (which rejects a lot of Unicode) ꙮ
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
I think the big issue with Unicode is that it is centralized and there are politics about what characters get included (see Klingon) I think I have a solution to decentralize Unicode: 1. Extend Unicode to 128-bits. We can still use UTF-8 variable length encoding which will limit the real size. 2. Use a blockchain to coordinate the characters. That way whoever wants to add a character can do it without gatekeeping. These simple suggestions will go a long way in making Unicode less centralized.
zoltar 4y ago
And yet no word on adding Cistercian numerals?
SnowHill9902 4y ago
That character triggers my trypophobia.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  I was astonished not to see this mentioned at all when I saw the post earlier! Almost commented about it myself but I wanted to think about something else.
personjerry 4y ago
If you open the proposal [0] it kinda just looks like someone doodled some flowers on the text rather than actually used a particular letter. And given it's the ONLY existing record of this letter, it's very suspect isn't it? [0]: https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n5170-multiocular-o.pdf https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n5170-multiocular-o.pdf
- Gare 4y ago
  It's in place of "goo" in "mnogoočimi" (many-eyed) in the phrase "many-eyed seraphims", so it at least makes sense.
  - sterlind 4y ago
    my Old Church Slavonic is pretty rusty (well, nonexistent), but "mnogo" looks like modern Russian много (many), and the -imi I guess would be instrumental plural like -ими? but Russian for "eye" is глаз or око. I'm guessing oč -> око, and it's a compound word? or is the č an infix, something like "ogo" is eye, and mnogoočimi is such because the two -og-s (one from mnog and the other from go) fuse because "mnogoögočimi" would be awkward to pronounce?
    - generationP 4y ago
      Pretty sure it is mnogo-oči-tii. The word "oči" still means "eyes" (although mostly in poetry).
tomcam 4y ago
Thank heavens. I was always so annoyed the way my multiocular O's came out, especially on 4chan
chmod775 4y ago
But how do we opt out of the update!
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  Use a font that contains the previous glyph. This is just an update to the reference glyph, and there is nothing prevents you from using a font that has an upside-down A in the place of U+0041.
generationP 4y ago
Since this link list https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/09/links-517-rip-van-linkle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/09/links-517-rip-van-link... , the character has become somewhat of a meme in the appropriate circles. Not surprised it's getting some love at last.
scotty79 4y ago
Personally I'm waiting for Kaktovik numerals in unicode.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Aren't they there already? 𝋀𝋁𝋂𝋃𝋄𝋅𝋆𝋇𝋈𝋉𝋊𝋋𝋌𝋍𝋎𝋏𝋐𝋑𝋒𝋓 Or do you mean waiting for more fonts to support them?
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Which fonts do support them?
moistly 4y ago
Cut & paste from the pdf: многочитїй. Hmmm. Well, on my screen, it’s lips/kiss. A Unicode fail.
just-ok 4y ago
From the tweet’s image: > written in an extinct language, Old Church Slavonic It’s absolutely not extinct and is used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in their religious texts almost exclusively. It’s taught to children alongside their Sunday school curriculum and, of course, in seminaries.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Generally languages with only liturgical usage are not considered “living” languages, just as the Latin if the Catholic Church is still considered a “dead” language.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

372 points by SerCe 4y ago

And then people wander why software developers don't care to support Unicode properly. First 60,000+ characters made sense, than few more were needed and Unicode suddenly got to play with a 1,000,000+ and just went off the rails.

lifthrasiir 4y ago
You can support Unicode without ever having to display all possible characters "correctly".

kratom_sandwich 4y ago

I love this character and I love the fact that is being updated. Just to get this right: at some point some person chose to doodle the letter instead of writing it the correct way and now we have a corresponding Unicode character? Sort of amazing and it also makes you think ...

lmkg 4y ago
There was a... "tradition" is a strong word, perhaps "trend" is better. Authors making copies of the Bible or related works in Cyrillic, that the letter O (equivalent to Roman O) at the beginning of the word for "eye" would be stylized to look like an eye. There are a variety of glyphs along these lines: Ꙩ, Ꙫ, Ꙭ. All of them, including ꙮ, were added to Unicode as a single group. The glyph "ꙮ" was used to refer to an Angel with a whole buncha eyeballs, as one does. In terms of texts that survive today, this specific glyph has exactly one use in a single manuscript from the 1400's. It might have been used more, in texts which don't survive. But it is part of a larger trend, and I bet that its inclusion in Unicode depends strongly on that. But yeah, in itself the ꙮ character exists solely so that modern computers are capable of a more-faithful rendition of the transcription of a single handwritten copy of the Book of Psalms.
- happytoexplain 4y ago
  Thank you for describing the missing context. I couldn't understand why this stylized letter deserved a code point more than the uncountable others. I don't necessarily agree still, but the fact that this character was only unique within a larger trend makes it much more reasonable.
- henriquecm8 4y ago
  So you are saying that the glyph is now more biblically accurate?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    The Bible doesn't specify how many eyes seraphim have. "In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. ... Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings."
- cyral 4y ago
  > modern computers are capable of a more-faithful rendition of the transcription of a single handwritten copy of the Book of Psalms. I wonder if there is even a copy of the book transcribed to actual characters or if it only exists as scanned PDF copies? If anyone did transcribe it, would they have any knowledge that the ꙮ character even exists on computers?
- vintermann 4y ago
  Hah, and here I thought I was making a joke when I called it a biblically accurate O!
- caf 4y ago
  "meme"
Arnt 4y ago
I attended a Unicode meeting (or maybe two? not sure?) and came away with the impression that Unicode is like those open source projects that are used by half of the world and maintained by a handful of skilled and benevolent people. In Unicode's case I think most of them are paid, at least.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  That is what I understood too. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to add new letters to Unicode too if you try a bit. However that is a bit harder with emojis, that have their own subcommittee, which seem to be more bureaucratic and also more popular than the rest of Unicode. Everyone wants to make a new emoji.
cillian64 4y ago
It does raise interesting questions about what counts as decoration/formatting and what counts as part of the actual text. You could view these ocular O characters as purely decorative (like the fancy first character in a paragraph) but they could also be seem as a quirk of spelling which should be represented in unicode. But the multiocular O really does seem like one monk got bored one time and did some doodling.

sshine 4y ago

(┛ꙮДꙮ)┛彡┻━┻

throwaway98797 4y ago
cant unsee
- Izkata 4y ago
  Don't worry, you'll forget about this one when it gets six more eyes.
SnooSux 4y ago
Be not afraid
- drewzero1 4y ago
  Bee not afraid?
  - msla 4y ago
    Bee Nut Afraid. (When an apiarist is terrified.)
thechao 4y ago
┬─┬ノ( ꙮ _ ꙮノ)
loudmax 4y ago
ꙮ> === The James Webb Space Telescope.

etamponi 4y ago

By the same reasoning, the 7-eyed O has now been used more than once, so it deserves a glyph! So the right way to do this is to introduce a new character for the correct glyph, and also leave the current one (perhaps changing the title). Otherwise these tweets won't make when read by someone that updated to Unicode 15.0

jotato 4y ago
My thought as well
baybal2 4y ago
Unicode basic rule is that character definitions never ever change, even when enumerated erroneously.
- Arnt 4y ago
  Yes, but this is a change either way, because that codepoint's definition referred to that character. Either the reference or the description of the appearance has to change.
  - echelon 4y ago
    ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ Make a new character. Updating the existing character ruins the meaning of all previous usages. It's like trying to change an API. Don't disrespect your existing users. Make a new version. (ꙮ ͜ʖꙮ) Think of all the ASCII art this botches. That has to have some historical importance to the Unicode standards body. (⌐ꙮ_ꙮ) For scholarly digital (unprinted) documents where the correct character rendering matters, erroneous past usages can be trivially found with grep, a date search, and easily corrected. The domain experts will familiarize themselves with this issue and fix the problem. Don't take a shotgun to it! This message wꙮn't have the ꙮriginally intended meaning if the characters are updated from underneath. ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ ꙮ
koboll 4y ago
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.

xanathar 4y ago

So it's a Unicode character that represents a... blob with 10 eyes? Hordes of Wizards of the Coast lawyers getting ready for the big fight

gedy 4y ago
Name checks out: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Xanathar_(original) https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Xanathar_(original)
supernewton 4y ago
Nah, Beholders have 11 eyes, so we're good here.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  I feel like the spelling should be updated to Behꙮlders, or better yet, BehꙨꙮlders, to reflect that (of course, this would only make sense once the glyph update actually hits).

xashor 4y ago

Too bad I have to adjust my business cards for ꙮ.world

lordnacho 4y ago

Wait a minute, how will we refer to the old glyph in the future? Once this is updated the articles such as this one will have the new shape.

martin_a 4y ago
"The character formely known as U+A66E"
lifthrasiir 4y ago
There was a joke that U+A66E should retain seven eyes and further eyes should be added with a ZWJ sequence [1]. If that character somehow got very popular in modern texts, updating its glyph may result in an interoperability problem so such solution would have been needed. But that didn't happen so the glyph itself has been updated instead. [1] https://twitter.com/BabelStone/status/1323440365429542919 https://twitter.com/BabelStone/status/1323440365429542919

jerf 4y ago

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 world of the non-imaginary, we accept that a Unicode character with a hundred eyes is not practical and we accept the representation with just a few eyes, but generally agree that upgrading to 7 to 10 is a nice improvement, as 7 does not evenly divide into 100 but 10 does. This is important, because... reasons.

sshine 4y ago
From "The House of Asterion" by Jorge Luis Borges: "It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are infinite) (footnote: The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite.) are open day and night to men and to animals as well." https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house_of_asterion.pdf https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house...
- Eddonarth 4y ago
  That reminds me of the Nahuatl word centzon, which is used to mean either 400, or an innumerable/infinite number. The Aztecs used a base-20 number system, so 400 = 20*20. https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/10/the-centzon-totochtin-the-innumerable-divine-rabbits-mexico https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/10/t...
tempodox 4y ago
“Santa Clause” would translate to “holy clause”. There might be such a thing but I think you meant Santa Claus :)
- dtparr 4y ago
  Maybe just a big fan of the Tim Allen movie?

rafaelturk 4y ago

Finally!

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

remedan 4y ago
We do have a Unicode character for a gun: U+1F52B PISTOL. Most fonts that have it choose to style it as a water gun, though.
dafoex 4y ago
There's an emoji for handgun, but Apple and other big tech decided it needed to be a water gun. There is also a rifle character intended to represent the sport of shooting in a pentathlon, but again Apple threw its weight around and, while the character became codified in Unicode, it never became an emoji and no font from big tech supports it.
jrockway 4y ago
I guess because the goal of Unicode is to be able to represent every character that's appeared in language. This one is in a published book, while guns and a sexual intercourse symbol aren't. Emoji was a weird value add that Japanese mobile providers added to their phones before Unicode. To get them to move to Unicode, they had to keep them. That's why there's a Tokyo Tower emoji, but not an Eiffel Tower. That's why the post office has a 〒 on it. That people get any use out of emoji outside of Japan is really pure luck.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I've even heard emoji referred to as "the carrot that keeps the implementations current." Every time a new version of Unicode is published, a few more emoji are tacked on. It acts as incentive for all the cellphone carriers and such to put the money into updating their implementations, because nobody wants to be the one on the block with the one phone that can't render "Mirror Ball" . (ETA: LOL, Hacker News drops "Mirror Ball" https://emojipedia.org/mirror-ball/ https://emojipedia.org/mirror-ball/ from the comment when you post)
  - 4y ago

rizoma_dev 4y ago

I'm always happy to see some esoteric unicode updates

diimdeep 4y ago

Here[1][2] is the scan of manuscript from 1429, image #251 [1] https://lib-fond.ru/lib-rgb/304-i/f-304i-308/#image-251 https://lib-fond.ru/lib-rgb/304-i/f-304i-308/#image-251 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927102700/https://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/medium.php?col=1&manuscript=308&pagefile=308-0249 https://web.archive.org/web/20110927102700/https://www.stsl....

klyrs 4y ago
It's curious that the red ink blobs behind the "eyes" aren't included in the unicode glyph either...
aasasd 4y ago
So the text at that point literally talks about ‘many-eyes seraphims’. The eyes symbol is a pure gag—seems to be spliced in place of the letter ‘о’ in the word ‘eye’ just a little down the line. (However, Old Slavonic is a tough read due to no spaces, so I'm not sure about that word. But at least it's not the Glagolitic script, which was just ridiculous and actually had multi-circle letters.)
- chickenimprint 4y ago
  As far as I can tell it swallows up the preceding го. It seems to be preceded by other jocular glyphs among scribes. A regular o received a central dot when writing the word "eye": ꙩ Words containing "two" or "both" had an o replaced by two conjoined os: ꚙ It is only natural to carry on the in-joke for the dual and plural "eyes" like this: ꙭ Our scribe simply got a little excited, following the pattern to it's logical end point in the term "many-eyed"
nashashmi 4y ago
Looks more like a diagram in the middle of text. It's very unique. It should not be a character
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  It's used in place of the letter "o", so not purely a diagram but it feels like the role of a font to me, not a dedicated character.

politelemon 4y ago

Here's the original tweet where the discrepancy was noticed in 2020, and a photograph of a page inside the book where it's used: https://twitter.com/etiennefd/status/1322673792452354048 https://twitter.com/etiennefd/status/1322673792452354048

hulitu 4y ago

> Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated I fear this will lead to a lot of "bug fixes and performance improvements" in Android. /s

Stamp01 4y ago

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.

shadowgovt 4y ago
It's been seen once in the in-print wild. There's no way to know how many since-written documents will break if a whole codepoint is dropped.
bogwog 4y ago
Imagine you’re a historian from the future studying some old document, and you spot a weird character that you’ve never seen before. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to search for that character to see if it shows up in any other document? A simple OCR scan will bring up all the information you could ever need for that one weird symbol.
PeterisP 4y ago
Perhaps it's relevant to look at how it was introduced - as a "package deal" with many, many characters from medieval cyrillic literature, as described in this proposal https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07003r-n3194r-cyrillic.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07003r-n3194r-cyrillic.pdf It certainly made sense to include this package in Unicode, and the vast majority of those characters certainly should be in this proposal. You do have to draw the line somewhere, and obviously those close to the line will be debatable, no matter where you chose to draw it, like this particular symbol - but once you've decided that you will include the one-eyed O (small and capital) and the two-eyed O (small and capital), then putting in the many-eyed O as well to complete the set doesn't seem so far-fetched.
1-6 4y ago
I agree with your mindset. It’s time for a unicode replacement.
lifthrasiir 4y ago
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 still received code points because they are considered essential for digitaization of historical works, and multiocular O is no different.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

I want to be that person that has so much time on their hand they can afford to waste it on pointless things like this.

shadowgovt 4y ago
There's a career path to get there. It involves becoming someone who cares deeply about the ways and means of digitizing data stored in analog media. Drill down deep enough, and you'll find yourself in a fascinating world of coding an error. There are things like the "ghost characters," which are codepoints in Japanese that map to characters that were basically transcription errors when the team was putting together a full set of Kanji. Some characters with an extra horizontal line snuck into the set; they were likely caused by a transcription error because the character got split onto two pieces of paper by lines of text being copy-pasted into a records book, and the shadow cast by the thin extra layer of paper was misinterpreted as another stroke. https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html

memorable 4y ago

Alternative frontend version: https://nitter.net/jonty/status/1571615998335123457 https://nitter.net/jonty/status/1571615998335123457

diimdeep 4y ago

Being stuck on macOS Catalina with Unicode 12, I think there is a way to upgrade to newer versions and get new emoji support [1][2] [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/278937/is-there-a-way-to-update-the-emoji-font https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/278937/is-there-a-... [2] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emoji-picker.2260530/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/updating-maverickss-emo...

xenonite 4y ago

Sadly, ꙮ is not eligible for engraving by Apple on AirPods.

colejohnson66 4y ago
As of right now, it's available for "adoption": https://www.unicode.org/consortium/adopt-a-character.html https://www.unicode.org/consortium/adopt-a-character.html

baltimore 4y ago

Is there any end to this? E.g., why not include Galileo's pictograms of Saturn as seen here: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00004p https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

caf 4y ago
Galileo's pictograms aren't being used as a letter, though: they're explicitly a diagram (I believe he says "like this: <picture>").

perihelions 4y ago

Related thread, about non-existent CJK characters ending up in Unicode through transcription mistakes ("ghost characters"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095502 ("A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode", 180 comments) edit to add: The top thread in the 2020 repost was about ꙮ, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955536

vintermann 4y ago

Biblically accurate O?

BearOso 4y ago

And its new official name shall be the Trypophobigon.

dhosek 4y ago

This is not exactly a correct description. Unicode does not specify the appearance of characters, only their meaning. It seems what’s changed is the reference presentation of the character in the Unicode tables, not the character itself. Unicode goes to great lengths to preserve backwards compatibility so changing the meaning of a code point would violate that principle. Your OS or application providing Unicode 15.0.0 support will not change the appearance of U+A66E. The appearance is dependent on the font.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

Meanwhile I check back every now and again on MUFI (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative) [1] and it's still not in. [1]: https://mufi.info https://mufi.info

wheybags 4y ago

This kind of stupid thing is my problem with Unicode. We have all this baggage for stuff that nobody uses, and we need to deal with it forever. The worst for me is the way there is no possible way to encode a grapheme cluster as a constant size, so using Unicode make it impossible to have simple character access like an old style c string, no matter how big you make your char, even though it's totally possible with damn near every language that people actually use. So then we all end up paying this massive complexity tax everywhere to pay for support for some Mongolian script that died out 200 years ago (or multi codepoint encodings of simple things like é - just why, it was so avoidable).

JohnFen 4y ago
I hear you. I loathe working with Unicode for this exact reason. It's a bit of a nightmare due to its complexity. That said, what it's trying to do is enormously complex.
mkipper 4y ago
Before Unicode, everyone who came up with a character encoding scheme probably thought their system was good enough for any reasonable use-case. But they all had limitations that made them inadequate for things less obscure than representing some dead Mongolian language. It would be nice if we could come up with some magical system that optimally encodes all the text that "matters" and ignores everything else, but history has shown that to be very hard. So we're left with Unicode, which takes the approach of giving us (effectively) infinite code points to represent characters, with (effectively) infinite ways to visually represent them. That does lead to a bunch of "unnecessary" baggage and headaches, but it also solves a bunch of real problems that you probably don't know exist. Unicode is a pain in the ass, but it's a solution to a very hard problem. You can feel free to design your own solution, but you'll probably run head-first into all the problems Unicode was trying to solve from 40 years ago.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
I'm getting the impression that this is only "obvious" from a latin-cyrillic-greek alphabet point of view ? P.S.: Also, even for those, it would seem that one of the big reasons for things like combining characters was added to Unicode in order to be backwards compatible even with mutually incompatible encodings ?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

Am I alone in thinking that this is not so much a separate character, as a doodle a bored monk made to relieve a tiny bit of the tedium of copying manuscripts?

idlewords 4y ago

They should put in a few additional eyes as hot spares.

hidudeurcool 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago

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-desired subsets?

lifthrasiir 4y ago
> 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-desired subsets? You can't, and you are not expected to do so. You are limited by OpenType limit (65,535 glyphs), various shaping rules that possibly increase the number of required glyphs, and lack of local or historical typographic convention. Your best bet is either to recruit a large number of experts (e.g. Google Noto fonts) or to significantly sacrifice quality (e.g. GNU Unifont).
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I wasn’t aware of the 2^16 limitation. Thank you for the notes!
- poizan42 4y ago
  A single OpenType font file is limited to 65,535 glyphs. Nothing stops your font from being implemented as a series of .otf files (besides what people think of as a "font" when it comes to usage on computers). But yes, time constraints are the limiting factor. I don't think anyone is going to dedicate their entire life to making a single font.
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    While you are right that one logical font can consist of multiple font files (or possibly a OpenType collection), this constraint does affect most typical fonts, and in particular wide-coverage CJK fonts already hit this limit. Fonts supporting only one of Chinese, Japanese and Korean don't need that many glyphs, and probably even two of them will be okay, but fonts with all three sets of glyphs won't. It is therefore common to provide three versions of fonts, all differently named.

no-reply 4y ago

ꙮ I'll check back in the future.

pippy 4y ago

The Unicode can be ridiculous at times. It contains a character used once in a single manuscript in a extinct language, but not a standardized glyph for an external URL link.

msoad 4y ago

This is similar to "man in business suit levitating" emoji. How this stuff make it to Unicode?!

octoberfranklin 4y ago
I miss the good old days when character sets didn't feel the need for annual updates.
shp0ngle 4y ago
Levitating man is just an unicode encoding of an old Webdings (or windings?) font. There was an accepted proposal to add many windings and webdings letters as unicode endpoints. Thus, levitating man in a suit.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Crazy that it renders in HN comments (which rejects a lot of Unicode) ꙮ

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

I think the big issue with Unicode is that it is centralized and there are politics about what characters get included (see Klingon) I think I have a solution to decentralize Unicode: 1. Extend Unicode to 128-bits. We can still use UTF-8 variable length encoding which will limit the real size. 2. Use a blockchain to coordinate the characters. That way whoever wants to add a character can do it without gatekeeping. These simple suggestions will go a long way in making Unicode less centralized.

zoltar 4y ago

And yet no word on adding Cistercian numerals?

SnowHill9902 4y ago

That character triggers my trypophobia.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
I was astonished not to see this mentioned at all when I saw the post earlier! Almost commented about it myself but I wanted to think about something else.

personjerry 4y ago

If you open the proposal [0] it kinda just looks like someone doodled some flowers on the text rather than actually used a particular letter. And given it's the ONLY existing record of this letter, it's very suspect isn't it? [0]: https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n5170-multiocular-o.pdf https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n5170-multiocular-o.pdf

Gare 4y ago
It's in place of "goo" in "mnogoočimi" (many-eyed) in the phrase "many-eyed seraphims", so it at least makes sense.
- sterlind 4y ago
  my Old Church Slavonic is pretty rusty (well, nonexistent), but "mnogo" looks like modern Russian много (many), and the -imi I guess would be instrumental plural like -ими? but Russian for "eye" is глаз or око. I'm guessing oč -> око, and it's a compound word? or is the č an infix, something like "ogo" is eye, and mnogoočimi is such because the two -og-s (one from mnog and the other from go) fuse because "mnogoögočimi" would be awkward to pronounce?
  - generationP 4y ago
    Pretty sure it is mnogo-oči-tii. The word "oči" still means "eyes" (although mostly in poetry).

tomcam 4y ago

Thank heavens. I was always so annoyed the way my multiocular O's came out, especially on 4chan

chmod775 4y ago

But how do we opt out of the update!

lifthrasiir 4y ago
Use a font that contains the previous glyph. This is just an update to the reference glyph, and there is nothing prevents you from using a font that has an upside-down A in the place of U+0041.

generationP 4y ago

Since this link list https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/09/links-517-rip-van-linkle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/09/links-517-rip-van-link... , the character has become somewhat of a meme in the appropriate circles. Not surprised it's getting some love at last.

scotty79 4y ago

Personally I'm waiting for Kaktovik numerals in unicode.

josephcsible 4y ago
Aren't they there already? 𝋀𝋁𝋂𝋃𝋄𝋅𝋆𝋇𝋈𝋉𝋊𝋋𝋌𝋍𝋎𝋏𝋐𝋑𝋒𝋓 Or do you mean waiting for more fonts to support them?
- scotty79 4y ago
  Which fonts do support them?

moistly 4y ago

Cut & paste from the pdf: многочитїй. Hmmm. Well, on my screen, it’s lips/kiss. A Unicode fail.

just-ok 4y ago

From the tweet’s image: > written in an extinct language, Old Church Slavonic It’s absolutely not extinct and is used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in their religious texts almost exclusively. It’s taught to children alongside their Sunday school curriculum and, of course, in seminaries.

Tagbert 4y ago
Generally languages with only liturgical usage are not considered “living” languages, just as the Latin if the Catholic Church is still considered a “dead” language.

deleted 4y ago

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