Jul 26, 2026, 2:01 PMThe Greek alphabet has two rarities: a small small letter and a small big letter.
U+03BF GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON
U+03C9 GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA
(Also, as the White Knight might say, we have here two letters, what the letters are called, names of the letters (the codepoints), and what the names of the letters are called.)
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There is but one Unicode and the Consortium is its master.
@vnikolov
Of course, this originally was because ancient Greek distinguished long vs short and wrote the two differently, and then today it's borrowed for spelling particular conjugations.
But that brings up apparently weird decisions made by the Unicode Consortium -- and such things were always analyzed in depth, contrary to what most people seem to think.
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Back when I was young and brash, I sat in on the original pre-standard committee meetings for a year, just the core 12 or so people, it was never huge. I thought I'd be able to helpfully improve things.
It turned out that everyone there was genius level (literally -- I knew two of them personally) and had some appropriate deep background (e.g. one American spoke fluent Japanese, another fluent Chinese, both had studied ancient versions of the languages, etc).
Any apparent or real "mistakes" they made were due to political reasons -- having to give in to some country to get their buy-in.
Or like emoji -- invented in Japan, used heavily by Japanese phone companies, essential for use by Japanese phones -- and the Consortium still resisted adding them, because, hey, they're fucking cartoons, not a written language.
But you can imagine how they lost that battle, and we all know of the resulting worldwide impact.
They do go on record as having made mistakes they are reversing in the future, like supporting codepoints which can be either text *or* emoji depending on a selection indicator.
There are a thousand of those, for whatever political reasons, but there will be no more in the future.
Big topic.
Jul 27, 2026, 5:33 AMYes, definitely so, on all points.
To repeat, the people who have worked and who work on Unicode do know what they are doing.
Any mistakes they have made are way within reasonable limits.
I have never followed the treatment of emoji, but to me there is a fairly good analogy between emoji and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
(Obviously, it is not trivial to standardize the latter, but for different reasons.)
Yes, another long topic, especially since Chinese ideograms ought to be considered as well.