Unicode keep their eyes open ꙮ
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The letter appears only once in the wild. In a 1429 edition of the Book of Psalms written in Old Church Slavonic. "серафими многоꙮчитїи" which translates to "many-eyed seraphim".
ꙮ was included in Unicode 5.1. As of Unicode 15, it will be corrected. The original Unicode character has seven eyes. The version in the book has ten and the revised character will also have 10.
Then in the comments — holy crap! is that @flabdablet ? — Eyebrows McGee says:
This is why it's my fave glyph:
Most Proto-Indo-European languages had a grammatical number for nouns between the singular and plural called the dual. That is, we have "cat" and "cats," but most PIE languages had a special form for things in pairs. A lot of Celtic and Slavic languages preserve at least some dual forms. English retains only a few. "One/both/all" is one. "Either" and "neither" are also holdover dual forms, where grammatically you can technically only use them for two things -- "either this or that" but not "either this or that or this third thing" -- in case you ever wondered why you can't use "neither" for three things. (In Slavic languages, a really common dual form, even in languages that have otherwise dropped it, is "riverbanks.")
ANYWAY, in some Old Church Slavonic manuscripts, where a dual form was used (most often to say "two"), the scribes would turn "two" -- двое-- into двꚙе with the "double O" glyph.
Some OTHER scribes thought this was amazing, so specifically in the word "eyes" -- "очи" -- which is a dual-form noun because they typically come in twos, they'd use the "double monocular O" (Ꙭ, aka "boobs") to make two Os and turn them into eyes, thus: ꙭчи. See? TWO EYES!
WELL. ANOTHER scribe comes along and says, "two eyes? Seraphim have MANY eyes!" and when he comes to the phrase "many-eyed seraphim (Серафими мн҄оочитїи), he chooses to render it as "Серафими мн҄оꙮ҄читїи҄". CAUSE THEY'VE GOT A LOT OF EYES, y'all.
ONE TIME. This occurs ONE TIME in ONE MANUSCRIPT, but Unicode is dedicated to making sure manuscripts can be replicated accurately in unicode, so in 2008 we get a multiocular O.
BUT IT GETS EVEN MORE AWESOME, because they're updating it to the full 10!. Although do look at the manuscript and note that the original 10-eyed multiocular O has FLAMES LICKING OUT ON THE SIDES, so Unicode should get on that!
Anyway, I 100% approve of literally all of this, because there is nothing I love as much as TAKING A JOKE WAY TOO FAR, especially when the joke is more than 600 years old.
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the original 10-eyed multiocular O has FLAMES LICKING OUT ON THE SIDES, so Unicode should get on that!
Preferably by adding them to the combining diacritical marks block, because flames licking out on the sides of things has real potential for widespread use.
I could use some for the side of my face that the leopards didn't eat yet.
posted by @flabdablet at 2:04 PM on September 19
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Yes. Yes. Soon all will be in readiness.
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I like this little guy U+2368 APL Functional Symbol Tilde Diaeresis
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@cabrito ﷻ.
﷽ even.
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@Zecc said in Unicode keep their eyes open ꙮ:
The letter appears only once in the wild. In a 1429 edition of the Book of Psalms written in Old Church Slavonic. "серафими многоꙮчитїи" which translates to "many-eyed seraphim".
ꙮ was included in Unicode 5.1. As of Unicode 15, it will be corrected. The original Unicode character has seven eyes. The version in the book has ten and the revised character will also have 10.
Then in the comments — holy crap! is that @flabdablet ? — Eyebrows McGee says:
This is why it's my fave glyph:
Most Proto-Indo-European languages had a grammatical number for nouns between the singular and plural called the dual. That is, we have "cat" and "cats," but most PIE languages had a special form for things in pairs. A lot of Celtic and Slavic languages preserve at least some dual forms. English retains only a few. "One/both/all" is one. "Either" and "neither" are also holdover dual forms, where grammatically you can technically only use them for two things -- "either this or that" but not "either this or that or this third thing" -- in case you ever wondered why you can't use "neither" for three things. (In Slavic languages, a really common dual form, even in languages that have otherwise dropped it, is "riverbanks.")
TIL, plural of берег is really берегa (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/берег)I would say that that eyes are ears are more common, or at least more pronunciated. Czech, Slovak, Slovenian and Old Polish (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oko) even have two very different plural forms for the two meanings of the word: one for the body organ, the other for metaphoric (the universal one being "eyes of hurricanes" - correct translation cannot be possibly mistaken as "hurricanes can see").
Anyway, I 100% approve of literally all of this, because there is nothing I love as much as TAKING A JOKE WAY TOO FAR, especially when the joke is more than 600 years old.
Also, it will get handy. Let me state here for the record that I also proactively welcome our insectoid overlords!
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Unicode keep their eyes open ꙮ:
I would say that that eyes are ears are more common, or at least more pronunciated.
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@ixvedeusi said in Unicode keep their eyes open :
@Kamil-Podlesak said in Unicode keep their eyes open ꙮ:
I would say that that eyes are ears are more common, or at least more pronunciated.
The serꙮph also stares back, you know …
ꙮꙮꙮ Be Not Afraid ꙮꙮꙮ
