Hi, I don't think it is unreasonable for Unicode to take this stance on conlangs, especially those that are the IP of media franchises. Be it Paramount's Star Trek franchise, or the Tolkien Estate's languages used for Lord of the Rings... Those are fictional works, and ought to be treated as such. Both real-world usage and legal backlash are noteworthy issues here.
I would also like to throw in another example, the "Teyvat Script" of Genshin Impact, which is a franchise I personally like a lot. It directly translates Latin script into its own [1], and uses that in game. But does that mean that this script should be encoded into Unicode? Of course not. It is something that players / fans directly convert back first into Latin script, then into English (or whichever language miHoYo considered most appropriate for context). As such, it is a direct derivative of Latin, which is already encoded into ASCII even. While I do empathize with the sentiment of fans of all of the various fictional works covered here, I do not think that this is within scope for the Unicode consortium to encode. As a programmer, I do concern myself with the implementation of standards. Mostly those of the IETF, not Unicode, but still. Unnecessary bloat makes standards unnecessarily more complicated and harder to implement. And while I am a programmer, here it would likely involve font designers, and programmers implementing text rendering engines, all the same. So please don't bloat the Unicode standard like that. This is not a font repository, and I think it should stay that way. (If this message can't be sent to Unicode by myself, feel free to / please relay it on my behalf.) [1] https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Teyvat_Script[1] On Thursday, 28 May 2026 06:29:41 Central European Summer Time Gabriel Tellez via Unicode wrote: > Do these scripts (pIqaD, Tengwar, Cirth, Sarati) get used, in any notable > amount, for any purposes that aren't at all related to their > respective fictional universes? In that one document (L2/16-329) that > showed proof of pIqaD being used, only 1 single example was given of pIqaD > being used for something non Star Trek related (and Bing's translator > doesn't even have that feature anymore lol). Like it's not Monopoly in > pIqaD, it's *Star Trek themed* Monopoly in pIqaD. > > On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 4:17 PM Julian Bradfield via Unicode < > > [email protected]> wrote: > > On 2026-05-27, Vikki McDonough via Unicode <[email protected]> > > > > wrote: > > > Didn't the U.S. Copyright Office definitively state several years back > > > > that > > > > > writing systems *themselves* (as distinct from the fonts used to > > > > *display* > > > > > those writing systems) are not copyrightable ( > > > > Unicode operates in other places than the U.S.A. - that's kind of the > > point of it! > > > > I personally doubt that the Tolkien Estate/Trust would prevail in most > > jurisdictions, but they have deep pockets (they got $24M from the > > films). So unless you have a rich friend who will give an unlimited > > and binding guarantee to bankroll Unicode in all the jurisdictions it > > might be sued in, it ain't going to happen without the Estate's consent. -- [Met vriendelijke groet] [Best regards] [Michael De Roover] --- --- --- --- [Mail] [*@nixmagic.com] [michael@[email protected]] [Web] [https://michael.de.roover.eu.org] [Forge] [https://git.nixmagic.com] [Weather] [Antwerpen] [16:00] [27.9°C] --- --- --- --- [0] [2026-05-28 16:55 CEST] [~] [[email protected]] [$] [/usr/bin/sign-mail] [>_] --- --- --- --- -------- [1] https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Teyvat_Script
