BabelStone
babelstone.blogspot.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Andrew West writes about Unicode, historical scripts, and writing systems, including long s rules, Tibetan numerals, and new Unicode releases.
What HN saysHN commenters link it as an authoritative, detailed source on Unicode proposals, the long s, and unusual characters like Tibetan half digits.
17HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
7stories submitted
257story points
9 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The rules for using "ſ" (long s)3 people · 71 points · first shared 2010 · 38 comments on HN
- 2Numbers That Don't Add Up: Tibetan Half Digits (2007)2 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 3The Rules for Long S2 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
- 4What's new in Unicode 9.01 people · 101 points · first shared 2016 · 76 comments on HN
- 5What's new in Unicode 7.0?1 people · 74 points · first shared 2013 · 37 comments on HN
- 6What's new in Unicode 7.0?1 people · 5 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 772 More Views of the Tower of Babel1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 8When is swastika not swastika1 people · first shared 2017
- 9How many unicode characters are there1 people · first shared 2014
- 10Homepage1 people · first shared 2017
- 11Vertical layout in ie81 people · first shared 2009
- 12Whats new in unicode 701 people · first shared 2014
- 13Whats new in unicode 801 people · first shared 2016
What HN people wrote when they linked it
pwdisswordfish · 2017-06-21
> Flags for England, Scotland and Wales are part of Emoji 5.0 and not shown here as they don't require new code points.
Apparently Unicode Inc. isn't concerned with flag emoji at all. This 'Emoji 5.0' is a completely independent standard.
Personally, I prefer reading about Unicode updates from http://babelstone.blogspot.com/ ; it doesn't mix up details like those, and covers additions beyond sensationalist fluff like emoji.
smackfu · 2014-06-17
This page has links to the proposals to add characters:
http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2013/10/whats-new-in-unicode-70.html
Including this one with comments on the Wingdings addition.
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4239.pdf
a) Ireland recommends adding the following new characters to this table:
1F597 REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED
1F598 RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS
bgrainger · 2010-12-18
Andrew West provides an excellent (and detailed) list of the rules for using "long s" (as well as some Ngram graphs) at http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html.
shervinafshar · 2017-12-27
I don't believe that Swastika symbol is as ancient as these. Wikipedia tells me that it appears for the first time in 3000 BCE in India.
Also, regarding "German Laws and general sentiment", I invite you to read this detailed blog post[1] on the history of Svasti symbols in Unicode[2] and the controversies around getting them in Unicode.
Edit: Typo. Links corrected.
[1]: https://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/02/when-is-swastika-not-swastika.…
[2]: https://unicode.org/cldr/utility/list-unicodeset.jsp?a=%5B%3Aname%3D%2…
lifthrasiir · 2017-07-03
This reminds me of the only Unicode character (as of 10.0) which numeral value is negative: U+0F33 TIBETAN DIGIT HALF ZERO has a value of -1/2. Andrew West has written an interesting article [1] about this and other "half" Tibetan numerals.
[1] https://babelstone.blogspot.com/2007/04/numbers-that-dont-add-up-tibet…
andybak · 2016-01-04
Anyone scratching their head over the reasoning behind the ballooning number of emoji might enjoy reading this post by the same author: http://babelstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/whats-new-in-unicode-80.html
alister · 2014-04-26
More fun facts:
- We went from 128 ASCII characters to 110,187 currently-assigned Unicode characters (or Encoded Character code points, to use precise language)[1]. That's a thousand-fold increase. Who would have thought we'd need so many!
- Unicode can represent 1,114,112 code points. So there's lots of room for yet more.
[1] http://babelstone.blogspot.ca/2005/11/how-many-unicode-characters-are-…
gus_massa · 2014-01-28
To jump to the final part "The Demise of the Long S": http://babelstone.blogspot.de/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html#Demise
corin_ · 2011-10-07
A good article was submitted a while ago, discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059173 and article at http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html
quant18 · 2009-10-27
IE8+Vista is still the only combination which can display traditional Mongolian script web pages properly. (Granted this is rather more obscure than Korean, but it's still useful to about 5 million people + every Qing dynasty historian.) All the others:
1. don't implement/misimplement joining/shaping behaviour
2. don't support vertical left-to-right layout
Though to be fair, for the better part of a decade MonTex was the only solution for anyone who wanted to write a document in Mongolian/Manchu/Dagur/etc.
http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie8.html