The character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated in version 15.0.0. Because it doesn’t have enough eyes. It needs to have three more eyes.
This character is rare. Very, very rare.
Rare enough to occur in a single phrase, in a single text written in an extinct language, Old Church Slavonic. The text is a copy of the Book of Psalms, written around 1429 and kept in Russia.
Basically, in some old Slavic languages, authors would stylise the “O” in their word for eye (“ꙩкꙩ”) by adding a dot in the middle to make it look like an eye. If there were two eyes, two of these characters would be joined together (“ꙭчи”). The final evolution of this character was “ꙮ”, used only once in human history, in the phrase “серафими многоꙮчитїи”, which translates to “many-eyed seraphim”.
Here’s how this relates to Unicode: the person who originally added this character to Unicode made a mistake, and didn’t count the number of eyes correctly. There should be ten eyes, not seven. This error was discovered in 2020, and now it has been corrected.
Awesome.
I cringe when I consider the number and nature of meetings required to accomplish this.
I suppose we should be thankful that this ended up as just a regular character and not some over-engineered general purpose solution.
Finally!
Weird that this is considered a seperate character, while it’s obviously just an embellishment of an existing one.
If it’s only used once in 1429 then the original author is long since dead and clearly there’s no other work to compare it to, so how does anyone know if the translation is correct?
And since it was clearly hand written so long ago, how do we know it wasn’t simply a mistake, or an illustration by the author rather than a character of the text?
I was curious about that exact thing, so did a quick search. According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_(Cyrillic) this character is a variation on a variation and used in a word meaning “many-eyed”. A single O with a dot in the middle was used for the word “eye” and another variant, “two-eyed”, had two O’s with dots in the middle. Each variant is a separate Unicode code-point. Based on this information, it’s certainly not a mistake.
Concerning if it was an illustration, the letter referenced is from a 15th century European bible. This is likely the only surviving handwritten work in this language, so it has to be assumed that all characters were in common use, at the time.
Hate to be that guy, but it looks better with seven. Can we have another char that has only seven? Would look great for Halloween decorations.
An Unicode news that it’s not about emojis. Surprising. I thought they no longer did useful work.
At least it’s a real character, unlike all those made-up emojis which didn’t exist in any written text or character set before and serve no other purpose than arbitrarily consume code points.