On 5/28/26 3:16 PM, Michael De Roover via Unicode wrote:
While the fandoms of each of these franchises are
enormous, their conlangs' usefulness does not currently extend beyond those
fandoms.
That's kind of true of everything: nobody uses X, except for X's
users. (I was trying to explain what Unicode was to someone once, and
said that they make the official emoji lists and everything, and he said
"yeah, but who uses those?" Um, millions of people, every day. "Yeah,
but aside from them?" Indeed, aside from people who use emoji, nobody
uses emoji.) This is a No True Scotsman argument.
But to the extent this argument isn't circular, it's really
offensive. The implication is "well, nobody outside of the fans are
affected, so it isn't really so important." Which is to say, the fans
are not important. Why is it okay to say this about fans of conlangs
(or anything else)? It isn't okay to say it about "Africans" or "Deaf
people" or "Yezidis" or "Meroitic Scholars", is it? That's the whole
complaint about the "hostility": the implication that the needs of fans
or nerds are somehow less important than the needs of other
people. That's bigotry, plain and simple.
Now, I know this statement was made in the context of pointing out the
legal difficulties, and indeed Unicode shouldn't be expected to expose
itself to legal liability for Africans or Yezidis or scholars either,
but the fact that it seemed okay to say "well, it's only fans, so it's
okay" is disturbing.
~mark
