Comment by shantara
4 years ago
My favorite Unicode glyph is Multiocular O (ꙮ). There is only one recorded usage, by a 15th century russian monk, who decided to use it in phrase “many-eyed seraphim” instead of two regular letters ‘o’. So of course it was added to Unicode.
It gets better: this glyph is bugged. Somehow, the guy responsible for adding it to Unicode somehow got the number of eyes wrong. Per his description, Unicode fonts represent it with 7 eyes, but after getting called out on Twitter he realized the original manuscript shows 10 eyes.
This bug will be fixed in Unicode 15.
Achieving peak Byzantium there, I guess.
What about modern uses of the character that specifically intended 7 eyes? Unicode needs to add a time or (worse, but probably OK) version datum to glyphs or glyph ranges, I suppose (applying it only at the document level wouldn't suffice, as in the case of quoting).
Going to the release note pdf, it will "expand" to 10 eyes by adding one more to the end of each horizontal row (if people are curious).
This one has sat in the back of my head for a long time. I wonder if any of the little ligatures or strange letter variations people write today could be preserved in the same way, or if the shorthand systems could be.