Unicode 7.0.0 has been released, with 2.834 new character codes. It’s been fascinating looking into some of the blocks that have been added; here’s a sampling.
Bassa Vah is a really obscure script from what is now Liberia, possibly predating the country. Old Permic is supposed to be a close relative of Cyrillic, but any visual resemblance is lost on me.
Some of the writing systems came from a religious impulse. Mende Kikakui was devised by an Islamic scholar and was once widely used for the Mende language in Africa. It’s been mostly displaced by the Latin alphabet. Shong Lue Yang introduced the Pahawh Hmong writing system for the Hmong language in southeast Asia, claiming to have received it from God. Pau Cin Hau, named after its creator, was a 20th century system used for religious writings in Burma. Its original version had over a thousand characters, but the Unicode block is based on the 57-character alphabetic system. The Manichaean alphabet is fascinating just because of its name, recalling the conflicts in early Christianity. According to tradition, Mani, the founder of Manichaeanism, created the alphabet.
Finally, one of the oldest writing systems in the world, Linear A, is new in Unicode 7. It’s from ancient Crete, and no one knows how to read its texts. Now you can create computer documents in it, if you’re a scholar of old languages or just like confusing people.
Still no Klingon, though.
Now the JHOVE UTF-8 module needs to be updated for all these new blocks.
Mad File Format Science 