Because the nature of the uniquely hostile IP situation was not fully understood until relatively recently.
—Doug Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G, an AT&T 5G smartphone Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ From: Unicode <[email protected]> on behalf of Vikki McDonough via Unicode <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2026 7:54:58 AM To: Mark E. Shoulson <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Seeming hostility to conlang scripts? Why, then, did Tengwar and Cirth manage to get on the SMP roadmap and stay there until very recently (something *none* of the other conlang scripts managed), if they faced a uniquely-hostile IP situation? - Vikki McDonough 🏳️⚧️ On Tue, May 26, 2026, 5:57 PM Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: 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
