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Comment by mtizim | Hacker News Reader

I highly doubt that last statement is true: 𓂺, ꙮ, 𒀱 .

You can definitely argue about whether Unicode should support long-dead or undeciphered languages, but those aren't the characters that cause problems in practice, or at least not more than any random emoji would and those have been embraced with fervor.

Egyptologists would disagree re your first there: it is D53 in the Gardiner sign list, used to spell words including 'urinate', 'poison', 'husband' and 'in the presence of' !

Point taken! I rephrase:

Every Unicode character and code point exists because somebody, somewhere, thought that somebody would find it useful.

That isn't true either; many Unicode characters exist solely because they were part of some other encoding standard that Unicode preserved in its entirety. For example, all of ASCII is preserved in that way. That's also why 囍, a character which does not have any linguistic use, is in there - it was included in an earlier Chinese encoding standard. Nobody thinks it was a good idea to separate U+2126 OHM SIGN from U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA either.

Is that true? It seems like screen readers would benefit from knowing the difference between Ohms and Omega, particularly if the surrounding text is in Greek.

What is the likelihood that a Greek article about electronics would use the Ohm sign when the Omega is right there on the keyboard?

English language physics texts routinely use the proper symbols, despite the fact that e.g. V is right there on the keyboard.

Omega is the proper symbol for Ohms. English-language physics texts use V when they're denominating in volts, too.

So there is no "v that signals the author knows some trivia"? Disappointed.

> It seems like screen readers would benefit from knowing the difference between Ohms and Omega, particularly if the surrounding text is in Greek.

Sure, just like they benefit from knowing the difference between 'V' and volts; 'J' and Joules; 'K' and Kelvins; 'A' and Amperes; π the letter, π the circle constant, and π the exotic particle; 'm', meters, and mass; 's', seconds, and position; 'g', grams, and gravity...

假設所有的意義都有自己的符號，那就太好啊

The character 囍 means "double happiness" literally, and is often used in wedding ceremonies among other places here in China. It is also included in the Xinhua dictionary, the semi-official dictionary in mainland China.

> The character 囍 means "double happiness" literally, and is often used in wedding ceremonies among other places here in China.

It's used by being hung on the wall, like a painting[1]. Like I said, it has no linguistic use, and thus it is not part of a writing system, which puts it outside the stated scope of Unicode. It is the exact equivalent, for weddings, of the upside-down 福 character that is hung for New Year's, or the wreath that Americans hang for Christmas.

But it does not correspond to anything in any language; there is no Chinese sentence whose spelling would include 囍. Note that the 新华 dictionary entry says "Double 喜. Generally used at happy occasions such as weddings.", and there are zero examples of the character being used. ( https://zidian.aies.cn/NDQ4MA==.htm )

The wording of the 新华 entry is almost identical with the beginning of the 汉语大词典 entry, and it's instructive to quote the rest of the entry:

> Character used at happy occasions. Commonly called "double 喜"[2]. Generally used at occasions such as weddings. Often cut from red paper (or gold leaf), or written on red paper, [then] pasted onto a door, window, or wall, in order to indicate a happy occasion.

[1] Actually, a much closer comparison would be the traditional magical talismans that use elements from the writing system in a freeform way to express various desired goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulu

[2] This dictionary is nice enough to make the fact completely explicit that 双喜 is the name of the character rather than a definition. 汉语大词典 doesn't even attempt to provide a definition for this character.

> it is not part of a writing system, which puts it outside the stated scope of Unicode.

Literally all emojis are not part of a writing system nor have proper linguistic use. Who on the earth write emoji by hand or even spoke it? Unicode already broaden the scope for so long, whether it is good or bad, nobody cares now. And beside that, a lot of symbols are also culture dependent. If you are not used to live at there, you just have no idea what it actually means.

> Literally all emojis are not part of a writing system nor have proper linguistic use.

Yes, that's true, and they've been a constant source of problems for Unicode ever since the decision was made to let them in. They stand in violation of Unicode's declared principles and purpose.

Note that 囍 is not considered an emoji by the Unicode standards, though that's what it is in fact.

> Who on the earth write emoji by hand or even spoke it?

But there is an example of this - the name of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Heart_Huckabees [wikipedia title uses the word "heart", but the actual title uses the symbol] was frequently spoken aloud.

I think the problem of emoji are more about they are in extended plane and they are colorful. The 'utf8' in sql assume we will never use extended plain and we actually used, which is the cause of former problem. Some of the chinese characters are also suffer from the form problem. And a lot of old system just can't draw the symbol in other color because it is designed prior to the exist of emojies.

In order to be in the original encoding standard somebody thought it was useful at some point

囍 is a really bad example of Unicode bloat since it's actually used very frequently.

The real issue are the thousands of characters that appeared incidentally in some ancient text, either as typo or as a weird interpretation of a common character, which then ended up in the Kangxi dictionary, and then subsequently imported en-masse into Unicode.

Example, 𠒇 - the only known use (in non-ancient times) of this character was being the official name of 雷莊𠒇, winner of the 2017 Miss Hong Kong Pageant. According to her, she intended to write 雷莊兒 when she applied for her official documents, but somehow the officials interpreted it as 𠒇, which is really an archaic form of 兒 (at best). Reportedly she's changing her name back to 雷莊兒

Thousands of such characters exist, if you look at the page where 𠒇 is supposed to originate, more than half of this is obsolete -- https://www.kangxizidian.com/v1/?page=125#gv

(So yeah, you're correct in essence but picking on 囍 as an example probably doesn't really get your point across...)

You've completely missed my point. Unicode is only intended to represent writing systems. It doesn't matter whether they're ancient, modern, common, or rare, but they're supposed to be writing systems.

囍 is used frequently, but it is not part of any writing system and does not convey any linguistic message. The opposite is true for 𠒇 - it is not used frequently, but it is part of a writing system and is used to convey linguistic messages.

The reason the point about 𠒇 holds is that it really isn't a character. I didn't claim it was "rare", I said it was a typo or a misinterpretation of an actual character (for the case of 𠒇 it is a misrepresented form of 兒.)

To presume a character is "real" merely because it exists in the Kangxi dictionary is as valid reasoning as presuming a character is "real" because it exists in "some other encoding standard" that you've been dismissive about. It's just that Kangxi is the de-facto Han character encoding scheme before computer encodings were invented. (Unihan even contains all details about the radical, stroke and even page number where it was sourced from)

A lot of those characters appeared once in some ancient text, and took the Kangxi form due to transcriptions from scribes across the centuries, but we actually have no evidence that they are "real" (at any point in time). Some of these characters are known alternative forms of common characters, or are only known to appear in some ancient text before Han characters were standardized. Some are plain typographical errors. It's like a 3 year old child learning to write "ABC", which looks a bit weird, and then the unicode committee assigned 3 code points to them.

> Some of these characters are known alternative forms of common characters, or are only known to appear in some ancient text before Han characters were standardized.

Those are entirely valid for Unicode. Han unification in Unicode is already considered a mistake. That's why "unified" code points now also have explicit, higher-numbered 'equivalent' code points that unambiguously refer to a particular graphical form. The graphical form is the whole point of Unicode.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Cyrillic glyph variant, and Cuneiform respectively.

I had to look them up so I might as well save others the time.

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