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Comment by revolvingocelot | Hacker News Reader

>Notoriously, they won't even allow Klingon.

I can't resist, gotta agitate about this. Unicode allocated space for the legendarily-untranslated Minoan script Linear A, for fuck's sake! Unicode allocated space for fucking Ogham script -- not that that's inappropriate, but it's unlikely to be used by the vast majority of people, now or in future, simply as a consequence of its antiquity and obsolescence.

Of course I'm revealing my 90s-trek power level here, but it's seriously puzzling (shading all the way up into quietly infuriating) that these dead languages' scripts are welcomed, while an, er, conlang that has actual living speakers can't have any of the frankly voluminous Unicodespace. QI'yaH!

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My pet peeve is U+A66E (CYRILLIC LETTER MULTIOCULAR O, ꙮ) [0], a glyph that had literally been used once only in history by a 15-century scribe before making its way into Unicode. And when it did, the reference rendering (7-eyed) is different from the one originally used by that scribe (10-eyed).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O

There's also plenty of "ghost" kanji which first appeared in a dictionary with no evidence for use and some which have been positively identified to a single source as a mistaken/sloppy handwritten attempt at a different real kanji character.

It's even funnier, the one use of the multi-ocular o was in a text referring to many-eyed (i.e. multi-ocular) seraphims.

Sounds like the only documented use was a visual pun from 600 years ago.

They better have an i with a heart replacing the dot...

You may be looking for https://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n258a-heartd...

> a glyph that had literally been used once only in history by a 15-century scribe before making its way into Unicode.

Your Wikipedia article says “certain manuscripts”, not a single use. (It does say it is only ever used in one specific phrase, though,)

That plural seems to be an addition of the Wikipedia editors. If you look at Karsky 1979 (page 197), there’s just one known manuscript that exhibits the phrase:

> Любопытно очное о в слове многоочитїи в псалтыри XV века Тр.-Серг. л. No 308, где о состоит из десяти Ꙩ, соединенных в виде орнамента

Anyone have a curated list of cool Unicode shapes?

The Unicode symbol preceding the topic of discussion, "Cyrillic letter Double Monocular O", has a rather suggestive shape: ꙭ

Everywhere I look something reminds me of her...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5OQMoSCrqw

well, that's definitely going into all my future Call of Cthlhu games whenever a shꙮggꙮth is mentioned...

Oh god, I'm going to be using double monocular O everywhere now.

I'm watching you... ꙭ

You mean... binocular?

Having been involved in archival projects including archaic scripts, I can tell you that academics feel a similar that the Unicode consortium seems to be prioritizing rafts of new emojis over texts that would be useful to academics. Let alone trekkie fanservice. Just use the PUA, if you really feel that strongly about it.

AIUI emoji are a different working group to languages (also I _think_ languages of academic interest might be a different group to languages in current use).

I am guessing that the big difference here is that ogham and linear A are public domain, while Paramount claims copyright ownership of Klingon.

>Paramount claims copyright ownership of Klingon

Well, sorta. Not according to the Language Creation Society! From the fallout of the case where Paramount/CBS sued the Axenar guys for the temerity to make a fan film without paying them for it comes this Washington Post opinion [0] (I've added the links found in the text at [1] and [2]):

>It seemed a stretch to suggest that the plaintiffs were claiming copyright in the Klingon language itself, and the court agreed, taking the somewhat unusual step of denying LCS’s motion to file its brief [1], on the grounds that the court didn’t have to “reach the issue of whether languages, and specifically the Klingon language, are copyrightable” in ruling on the case.

>The LCS has declared victory — at least to the extent that the final ruling in the case will not hold that the Klingon language is protected by copyright. Its statement — with a translation into Klingon, for those of you who read Klingon — is posted here [2].

The situation doesn't seem as rosy as the LCS' statement suggests, but as a consequence, I feel comfortable in claiming that Paramount does not currently, successfully, claim copyright ownership of Klingon. That said, "not getting sued by Paramount in future" is a pretty good reason for Unicode to exclude anything.

Tengwar, the script used to write Quenya and Sindarin, however...

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzmetJxi-p0VN0t5MWNPOTZ4SU0...

[2] https://conlang.org/axanar/#updates

Ok, my takeaway is that the question "can you copyright languages in the US copyright system?" currently sits at "maybe".

But we're at least sure you can't patent "a procedure for producing ATP using O2 as catalyst and energy source", right?

Right?

There is a difference between the copyright standard of the language itself (which may not be a copyrightable thing, though the court left that for future courts to decide in the given case) and the copyright standard of custom glyphs used by that language though. The custom glyphs themselves to "write" the language are artistic design elements usually recognized to have some copyright protections as with any works of art. (There's also further protections in they way they are often used that sometimes trademark protections also may be applied and looser defined "trade dress" protections as well. Aurebesh, the custom glyphs of Star Wars is pretty heavily defended by such protections in commercial projects.) Unfortunately, the sources for the Klingon glyphs are copyrighted movies and fonts owned or commissioned by ViacomCBS and there's not much of an argument to be made that they aren't art designs they own.

I believe the same applies to Tengwar that too much of comes from artistic work written and/or commissioned for books still in copyright and owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Perhaps when more of the copyrights expire on these originating works Unicode can revisit them. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen soon. (Even Tengwar isn't expected to expire until 2044, 70 years after JRR Tolkien's death.)

That, and it sounds like this is only covering a case in US copyright law. Unicode potentially has to worry about the rest of the world as well.

I can imagine that the Unicode Consortium's general feeling on the subject is outside the scope of their mission, and that pleasing a sci-fi fandom just isn't really worth the potential for headaches, and that it's better to let them continue to rely on ConScript.

My impression is that once the Astral Plane opened up, there's enough academic reason to want to encode those glyphs as there are certainly some really interesting academic work already using Klingon glyphs or Tengwar or others (I don't know if it is more or less than say Linear A, but it's not a contest), and we do risk losing some of that academic discussion if it isn't reliably encoded in something like Unicode. Academic papers are very clearly carved out in copyright laws as "fair use". Unfortunately to protect fonts as copyrightable a lot of the similar carve outs that should make any and all Unicode encoding of glyphs "fair use" are something of a swiss cheese at the moment, and yeah I don't blame Unicode for feeling that their mission definitely does not include fighting the definition of what should be "fair use" in most of the world.

> >Paramount claims copyright ownership of Klingon

> Well, sorta.

Paramount definitely claims copyright on the “Klingon” glyphs from various ST properties that fans have mapped to the language described in The Klingon Dictionary (which is newer than the glyphs), so as far as those glyphs and any derivative works are concerned – what both the Unicode Consortium and any font makers would be concerned with – Paramount’s copyrights are a problem.

Whether they own the language beyond that may be a murky legal question, but it is also beside the point.

(And, actually, what your source supports is that Paramount definitely claims ownership of Klingon, the other party in the case disputed it, and the court found that they didn’t need to decide the issue to resolve the case. That is in no way a “sorta” on “Paramount claims copyright ownership on Klingon”. That a third-party seeking to file an amicus brief against Paramount’s claim on that point chose to do a victory dance because they were told to go away because the issue they were concerned with was ultimately not material to the resolution of the case is…interesting spin, but not much else.)

>That is in no way a “sorta” on “Paramount claims copyright ownership on Klingon”

I see the problem. IANAL, but I take "Paramount claims copyright" to mean something legally enforceable; an uncontroversial legal right that they are claiming [0]. As suggested by both parent and the sources further above, that matter has yet to be settled, and wasn't addressed in the decision. The statement "Paramount claims that it has the copyright to the Klingon language" I wholeheartedly agree with (and disagree, obviously, on the ability of Paramount to claim copyright on a collaborative intellectual effort between James Doohan, Marc Okrand, and others, both due to nerd fervour and a bunch of hand-waving about the intersection of IP and morality that are beyond the scope of this tangent).

[0] Possibly this is due to the ubiquity of the phrase "copyright claim", deployed to describe the monetization of someone else's intellectual property. The uh claimant is presumed to have a legal right to the material being claimed, but it's not clear that Paramount has that legal right.

Voynichese script is public domain but there's no Unicode for that either. You can get a font for it though, but people studying the Voynich Manuscript usually make do with a transcription based on the Roman alphabet + Arabic numerals (e.g. EVA). Unlike Linear A (or Ogham), there's no consensus that Voynichese means anything, and there's only one book written in it.

Personal anecdote, but since Ogham has been available in Unicode, I've seen the odd person start being interested in it to write out names, exclamations, etc. It feels like a small previously-closed gate has been opened for a nice little way for people to connect and engage with an old part of our culture.

Oh, that's wonderful, actually! Between my perception of its rarity, and the seeming ability to easily represent it with vector graphics of straight lines, I figured it was a laudable target but I see that it isn't. After all, the idea of a niche script getting more attention because of its inclusion in Unicode is exactly what I'm all excited about.

I'll happily replace Ogham, in future rants, with that fucking multiocular O mentioned in a sibling to the parent.

So I think the main excuse at the time was that people usually use latin for Klingon. Which honestly feels like a bit of a chicken and an egg problem to me...

Exactly! The Latin character set is used precisely because Klingon fonts aren't standardized!! Nnh!

*hits inhaler*

Also, how are we read Shakespeare in the original Klingon on the internet?

Dead languages and scripts are studied, though. The Unicode is there for them so that scholars can type and print what was actually written/carved, instead of a Roman alphabet transcription. The problem with Klingon is it's a conlang, and anyone can design a new script for their conlang and demand a Unicode block.

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