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

"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...

Though to be honest, that Unicode character looks more like a bunch of cells forming a tissue to me than eyes.

Not in any normal sense of "roots". Cent is a Latin root meaning 100. ops is a Greek form meaning eye. The -i- indicates that the word is being formed in Latin, and the -cl- is entirely spurious. The original Greek word divides as cycl-ops, not cy-clops.

The real Greek for a hundred-eyed being would be something like "hekatonoptes", but Argus wasn't called that as far as I know.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner

I'm not sure we have space for another glyph in Unicode. Looks pretty packed in here...

Make a new character!

There's no way to know how many since-written documents will break if a whole codepoint is dropped.

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.

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).

Actually this character seems like a scribe's joke, no different from the illustrated characters at the beginning of medieval paragraphs (all of which are represented in Unicode as A, B or whatever). But the point still holds.

It even holds for modern languages -- consider the ghost characters needed for round trip compatibility: https://weekly-geekly.imtqy.com/articles/418717/index.html

(actually cuneiform is a poor example; perhaps Linear A would have been a better example)

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.

In Unicode's case I think most of them are paid, at least.

But the multiocular O really does seem like one monk got bored one time and did some doodling.

[1] https://twitter.com/BabelStone/status/1323440365429542919

  ꙮ>
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That said, what it's trying to do is enormously complex.

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.

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 ?

This is not true. For a concrete example: the languages Hindi and Marathi, with ~500 million speakers, use the Devanagari script (also used by Nepali and Sanskrit), in which a grapheme cluster is (usually) a sequence of consonants followed by a vowel. For instance, something like "bhuktvā" (भुक्त्वा) would be two grapheme clusters, one (भु) for "bhu" and one (क्त्वा) for "ktvā". In Unicode each vowel and consonant (here, bh, u, k, t, v, ā) is separately encoded, which is the only reasonable thing to do, and inevitably means that grapheme clusters can have different lengths (number of code points). The alternative would have been to encode every possible (sequence of consonants + vowel) as a single codepoint, which gets ridiculous quickly: these sequences can be up to 5 consonants long, so you'd end up having to encode (33^5 * 13 ≈ 500M) codepoints for Devanagari alone (or completely prevent certain sequences of consonants from being expressed, which makes no sense either), not to mention that most of the scripts of the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia follow the same principle and have similar issues (e.g. Bengali with 250M speakers, Telugu, Javanese, Punjabi, Kannada, Gujarati, Thai with over 50M speakers each, etc).

(See chapters 12–17 of the Unicode standard, currently version 15: https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch12.pdf)

There was an accepted proposal to add many windings and webdings letters as unicode endpoints. Thus, levitating man in a suit.

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