On 5/26/26 6:32 PM, Rebecca Bettencourt via Unicode wrote:
Unicode's "hostility" to conlang scripts has actually been
*decreasing* over the years. Such proposals used to be rejected
outright for not being notable or not having a large enough user
community. That is not the case anymore. Klingon, Sitelen Pona,
Tengwar, and Cirth have all actually been recognized as having a large
enough user community; the objections being raised now are actually
much more complicated issues to navigate: copyright status and stability.
Unicode does not want to include Klingon without a letter from
Paramount's legal department stating that they will not sue anyone who
implements it, but Paramount simply does not care enough to spend
legal resources on that. Tengwar and Cirth are in the hands of the
Tolkien estate, which is extremely controlling about the use of their
intellectual property and is not going to give permission to encode
them. And while it's legally questionable whether a writing system can
actually be copyrighted, Unicode does not have the resources to find out.
It should be noted, though, that the only *official* reason for
rejection of Klingon is still "because we don't want to be associated
with Those Kinds of People." The proposal to reject Klingon
(https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2001/01212-RejectKlingon.html), adopted by
Unicode (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2001/01183.htm) mentions nothing
about IP problems or lack of usage. This remains the reason it is on
the "Not to be Encoded" list, even though (at the suggestion of Ken
Whistler https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m11/0091.html)
there was a proposal not to approve it, but just to remove it from the
"No" list (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21155-klingon-req.pdf)
Removing it from the "Not Encoded" list would have been a way to signal
a lessening of hostility without actually doing anything (and thus
without running risks of IP problems.)
Has the hostility been decreasing over the years? Perhaps, even
probably. There has been unofficial recognition that "lack of usage" is
no longer a valid argument against Klingon (after a new proposal,
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16329-piqad-returns.pdf showed a great
deal of usage.) But there still seems to be something in the "dignity
argument" (Klingon is beneath the dignity of Unicode, because only nerds
speak it), brought down explicitly in the Proposal to Reject linked
above and on this mailing list
https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2021-September/009589.html
AFAIK, Sitelen Pona is, indeed, insufficiently fleshed out (but I may
not be well-enough informed), and the Tolkien estate has come out
explicitly against the encoding of Cirth and Tengwar (which I think
deserve encoding more than Klingon does, but whose IP situation is
rather more clear against it.)
Several new writing systems which have been encoded are no older than
some conlang scripts, like Adlam (1989), Osage (2006), Signwriting
(1974) (and honestly, the IP status of some of them is not clear either,
though it's definitely an issue in things like Blissymbolics and I think
maybe Mandombe), so it clearly isn't a matter of needing to be an *old*
established system... just an established one, and these did demonstrate
usage and a community.
So, yeah, the hostility may be on the decline. It's still the official
stance, though.
~mark
