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

When my kids were young, I accidentally flubbed the pronunciation of &quot;Santa Claus&quot; once and said something that sounded a lot like &quot;Centiclops&quot;, 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.<p>Today I learn that Centiclops effectively has a Unicode character. As Centiclops&#x27; 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.

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&#x27;t make when read by someone that updated to Unicode 15.0

Here[1][2] is the scan of manuscript from 1429, image #251<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lib-fond.ru&#x2F;lib-rgb&#x2F;304-i&#x2F;f-304i-308&#x2F;#image-251" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lib-fond.ru&#x2F;lib-rgb&#x2F;304-i&#x2F;f-304i-308&#x2F;#image-251</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110927102700&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stsl.ru&#x2F;manuscripts&#x2F;medium.php?col=1&amp;manuscript=308&amp;pagefile=308-0249" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110927102700&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stsl....</a>

I don&#x27;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&#x27;s semantically identical to another more widely used character.<p>I&#x27;m glad I&#x27;m not responsible for unicode. Clearly I have the wrong mindset for it.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m not an expert by any means.<p>But something just doesn’t feel right when you’ve got unicode with a character with one known use from forever ago.<p>Doesn’t this open up the flood gates to just a ridiculous amount of work or else biased gatekeeping?<p>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?

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 ...

This is not exactly a correct description. Unicode does <i>not</i> 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.

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.

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&#x27;s the ONLY existing record of this letter, it&#x27;s very suspect isn&#x27;t it?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicode.org&#x2F;wg2&#x2F;docs&#x2F;n5170-multiocular-o.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicode.org&#x2F;wg2&#x2F;docs&#x2F;n5170-multiocular-o.pdf</a>

Here&#x27;s the original tweet where the discrepancy was noticed in 2020, and a photograph of a page inside the book where it&#x27;s used:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;etiennefd&#x2F;status&#x2F;1322673792452354048" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;etiennefd&#x2F;status&#x2F;1322673792452354048</a>

Related thread, about non-existent CJK characters ending up in Unicode through transcription mistakes (&quot;ghost characters&quot;):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32095502" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32095502</a> (<i>&quot;A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode&quot;</i>, 180 comments)<p>edit to add: The top thread in the 2020 repost was about ꙮ,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24955536" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24955536</a>

So it&#x27;s a Unicode character that represents a... blob with 10 eyes?<p><i>Hordes of Wizards of the Coast lawyers getting ready for the big fight</i>

(┛ꙮДꙮ)┛彡┻━┻

&gt; Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated<p>I fear this will lead to a lot of &quot;bug fixes and performance improvements&quot; in Android. &#x2F;s

From the tweet’s image:<p>&gt; written in an extinct language, Old Church Slavonic<p>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.

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

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

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.

This kind of stupid thing is my problem with Unicode. We have all this baggage for stuff that <i>nobody uses</i>, 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&#x27;s totally possible with damn near every language that people actually use.<p>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).

Alternative frontend version: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;jonty&#x2F;status&#x2F;1571615998335123457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;jonty&#x2F;status&#x2F;1571615998335123457</a>

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]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;278937&#x2F;is-there-a-way-to-update-the-emoji-font" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;278937&#x2F;is-there-a-...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;updating-maverickss-emoji-picker.2260530&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;updating-maverickss-emo...</a>

Meanwhile I check back every now and again on MUFI (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative) [1] and it&#x27;s still not in.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mufi.info" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mufi.info</a>

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?

And its new official name shall be the Trypophobigon.

Is there any end to this? E.g., why not include Galileo&#x27;s pictograms of Saturn as seen here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edwardtufte.com&#x2F;bboard&#x2F;q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00004p" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edwardtufte.com&#x2F;bboard&#x2F;q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...</a>

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

I&#x27;m always happy to see some esoteric unicode updates

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

That character triggers my trypophobia.

Thank heavens. I was always so annoyed the way my multiocular O&#x27;s came out, especially on 4chan

But how do we opt out of the update!

Cut &amp; paste from the pdf: многочитїй.<p>Hmmm. Well, on my screen, it’s lips&#x2F;kiss. A Unicode fail.

This is similar to &quot;man in business suit levitating&quot; emoji.<p>How this stuff make it to Unicode?!

Finally!

Personally I&#x27;m waiting for Kaktovik numerals in unicode.

And yet no word on adding Cistercian numerals?

ꙮ I&#x27;ll check back in the future.

Since this link list <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;links-517-rip-van-linkle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;links-517-rip-van-link...</a> , the character has become somewhat of a meme in the appropriate circles. Not surprised it&#x27;s getting some love at last.

Biblically accurate O?

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.

And then people wander why software developers don&#x27;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.

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