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Why are unicode characters outside the BMP called astral?
Thank you for the A2A, Jelle Zijlstra, and why do I suspect that you’ve read my page Astral Planes?
There’s 17 * 65536 characters in Unicode. Each 65536 characters is called a Plane. The first plane, the BMP, is the plane that most characters you will ever encounter are in. Only two other planes are used (or indeed likely to be used), and they contain obsolete, archaic scripts or characters in scripts that won’t get used much at all, and that most people will rarely encounter.
Or, per Plane (Unicode) – Wikipedia
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (= [math]2^{16}[/math]) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16 decimal, which corresponds with the possible values 00–10 hexadecimal of the first two positions in six position format (hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly-used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called “supplementary planes”, or humorously “astral planes“.
Thank you Wikipedia.
Actually, you know what? I’ll cite me. Astral Planes
So as of Unicode 3.0.1 (August 2000), Unicode is organised into 16 planes, each of 64K; this gives over a million codepoints, which should be enough for all needs, past present and future. The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), or Plane 0, is the first 64K, which is what was in use until 2000, and where just about everything useful will still reside. The other planes are termed Supplementary.
The supplementary planes are an innovation in how characters are internally represented—programmers have to assume a character can have a million possible values, not just 64K, which means they often have to change their existing code. Furthermore, they are not drastically common in use: most ‘real’ scripts (though not all) are ensconced in the BMP. […]
The informal name for the supplementary planes of Unicode is “astral planes”, since (especially in the late ’90s) their use seemed to be as remote as the theosophical “great beyond”. There has been objection to this jocular usage (see “string vs. char” and subsequent discussion on Unicode list); and as Planes 1 and 2 spread in use there will be less occasion to feel that the planes really are ‘astral’. But the jocular reference is harmless, and it serves as a reminder that we’re not quite there yet.
Astral plane is a joke on Astral plane: they’re “planes” of characters, but they were inaccessible and immaterial, you’d never get to them, your software would never get to them, and you’d never need to get to them: they were abstruse and obscure. The joke was coined on the Unicode mailing list.
The term is still in use; e.g. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/i… . And the term still means something: legacy products still fail to support them (such as… oh, the Quora text editor).
There’s a simple reason why those planes aren’t particularly astral any more. In amongst the Deseret and Nabataean and Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is one set of characters in the supplementary planes that sees a *lot* of usage now, and that users have come to expect all their platforms to support. Those characters weren’t in Unicode when I wrote my page in 2003, but they’re there in the Astral Planes now.
Those characters are, of course, Emoji.
What is the word on Wonder woman’s shield?
Wonder Woman’s Shield says that the quote OP gives is on the shield. However, The Badass Quote That’s Engraved On Wonder Woman’s Sword says that it is on her sword:
In the “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Tech Manual” (via Digital Spy), it’s revealed that director Zack Snyder wanted inscriptions on the sword and shield. After coming up with a “hybrid extinct language,” the team inscribed the sword with a quote from Joseph Campbell’s collection “Goddess: Mystery of the Feminine Divine.” Here’s the quote translated into English:
“Life is killing all the time and so the goddess kills herself in the sacrifice of her own animal.”
What is Written on Wonder Woman’s Shield in BATMAN V SUPERMAN? | Nerdist links to a transliteration of the inscription on the sword (it says shield, but the closeup of the sword has the same text), done by Vince Tomasso: The “Greek” on Wonder Woman’s Equipment in ‘Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice’
The Greek makes no sense, and it has random digammas and a letter that Tomasso did not recognise, and that I’m proud that I did: Sampi (in its arrow variant). It looks like they made up the language for the quote, and I would not be surprised if they just made up a bunch of random letters, rather than a fully-fledged language. But Greek it isn’t. The archaic letters do indicate this is supposed to be some sort of fictional pre-Greek…
What does Archaiomelesidonophrunicherata mean?
My thanks to Konstantinos Konstantinides for doing the back research.
The word is real, and it’s not mangled much: it should be –melisi– It’s another coinage by Aristophanes, from Wasps 220: ἀρχαιομελισιδωνοφρυνιχήρατα. Aristophanes, Wasps, line 183
ὡς ἀπὸ μέσων νυκτῶν γε παρακαλοῦσ’ ἀεί,
λύχνους ἔχοντες καὶ μινυρίζοντες μέλη
ἀρχαιομελισιδωνοφρυνιχήρατα,
οἷς ἐκκαλοῦνται τοῦτον.They arrive here, carrying lanterns in their hands and singing the charming old verses of Phrynichus’ Sidonian Women; it’s their way of calling him.
The breakdown is:
- archaio– ‘old’
- meli– ‘honey’
- Sidōno– ‘Sidonian’
- Phrynicho– ‘Phrynichus’
- eratos ‘lovely’
In Ancient Greek, does the middle voice of φιλέω (φιλέομαι) mean “I love in my own interest,” “I love myself,” (reflexive) or “I am loved” (passive)?
I’m going to do some backgrounding on this for people not blessed enough to have delved in the waters of Greek.
English makes a distinction between active and passive voices of a verb.
Homeric Greek made a distinction between active and middle voices of a verb. It distinguished between you actively doing something to the world, and you just sitting there. If you were having things done to you (passive), you’re just sitting there. If you are doing things to yourself (reflexive), you’re just sitting there. If you two are doing things to each other (reciprocal), you’re just sitting there. And if you are doing things for yourself, you are still just sitting there: in all these instances, you are not actively doing something to the world, outside of yourself.
The distinction puts some instances that in English would be active into the middle voice. The verb for sleep is in the middle voice. So is the verb for work.
So, in that division of the world, the middle voice of ‘love’ can mean all of the above: “I love for myself”, “I love myself”, and “I am loved”.
In Homeric Greek, you occasionally have a verb form in the aorist that looks somewhat different from the middle. This ended up extended to the future tense in Attic (in a very morphologically awkward way), and it was supposed to be the emergence of a distinct passive voice in those tenses, whereas the future and aorist middles kept their middle meaning (“just sitting there”, including reflexives, reciprocals, and self-benefit).
That’s the theory. In practice, you will still find aorist passive forms with middle meaning, and aorist middle forms with passive meaning: they were easily confused, and Greek writers really did confuse them. The legacy is that in Modern Greek, we only have active and passive forms in the aorist…
… and the passive forms have the same range of meanings as the Homeric middle: the forms have switched, the underlying meaning hasn’t. Remember: the middle/passive distinction only ever happened in the aorist and future, and even there it was garbled. In the present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect, Greek continued to use the one voice for both middle and passive, throughout. Greek simply got rid of the outliers in the aorist: it kept the semantics the same.
So, if I may introspect on the modern verb αγαπιέμαι: in the plural, it would be interpreted as “we love each other” (αγαπιόμαστε), and in the singular, it would be interpreted as “I am loved”. That’s not about preference of one meaning over the other, that’s about context and plausibility. Other words have different default interpretations. An inanimate subject of κλέβομαι “be stolen” is passive; a human subject will be interpreted as reciprocal (we stole each other = we eloped).
And there is the possibility of confusion between middle and passive still. I once used the middle of self-benefit with reference to shopping: I announced to my cousin that ψωνιστήκαμε “we went shopping (for things for ourselves)”. My cousin told me to shut up, because the idiomatic interpretation of the verb “to shop” in the middle/passive voice was not self-benefit, but passive: “we were shopped for, someone went shopping to buy us”. Which applies to street prostitutes.
Can you write an English sentence, phonetically, in another script without changing the language?
Όου Γκουντ Λορντ. Μάι μπρέιν ιζ χέρτιγκ του. Δε πέιν, δε πέιν…
… Χαγκ ον, James Garry, γιου ρόουτ Ένσιεντ Γκρικ, νοτ Μόντερν. Οκέι. Λετ μι όφερ μάι ατέμτ.
I’m pretty sure Ancient Greek rendered [θ] as [s], e.g. the Laconian early lenition of /tʰ/. [ð] by analogy, and just as in French stereotype, would be [z], but Ancient Greek didn’t have a [z], and [dz] would be a poor equivalent. I’d stick with [d].
Νο [v] either. Hm.
And yes, I will have an Australian accent in my vowels. With a proud eta for æ.
This is my rendering of James’ para.
Δὲ πρόβλεμ ἲς δὰτ δὲ Ἤνσεντ Γρὶκ λάγγυαζ λὴξ μένι σαὺνζ δὰτ Ἴγγλις ἥς. Αἲ κὴντ ἴυεν ῥαὶτ μαὶ ωὒν νεὶμ πρόπερλι βικὼς δὲρ ἲς νωὺ λέτα υἳτς ῥεπρεσέντς [dʒ]. Αἲ στὶλ λαὶκ ἲτ δωὺ. Δὲ Γρὶκ σκρὶπτ ἲς οὐὰν ωὒ δὲ πρίτιεστ ἲν δὲ ὑέρλδ. Αἲ λοὺκ φόρυαρδ τοὺ ῥίδιγγ Νὶκ Νίκολας ἀτέμτ ἢτ δίς, ἢνδ σίιγγ ἲφ ἲτ ἥς μὼρ ωὒ ἀν Ὠστρείλιαν ἤξεντ τοὺ ἴτ.
And for added bonus, a transliteration back into IPA:
de próblem is dat de ɛ́ːnsent ɡrik láŋɡyadz lɛːks méni saundz dat íŋɡlis hɛ́ːs. ai kɛːnt íuen r̥ait mai ɔːun neːm próperli bikɔ̀ːs der is nɔːu léta hyits r̥epresénts [dʒ]. ai stil laik it dɔːu. de ɡrik skript is uàn ɔːu de prítiest in de hyérld. ai luk pʰóryard tu r̥ídiŋɡ nik níkolas atémt ɛːt dís, ɛːnd síiŋɡ ipʰ it hɛːs mɔːr ɔːu an ɔːstréːlian ɛ́ːksent tu it.
What are some words or phrases that are only used in your region?
Let us now praise Australian hypocoristics. Or Diminutives in Australian English. I’ve seen hypocoristic used here, because the Australian forms aren’t used like normal diminutives, to indicate that something is cute or small; hence bikie “member of a motorcycle club, with a connotation of involved in criminal activity”. Of course, hypocoristic is just Greek for baby-talk (‘under child do’), which these aren’t either; but whatevs.
Have a look at that list linked above. Yes, we really do talk like that. It’s not just about throwing a shrimp on the barbie (and we call them prawns anyway).
We really do get aggro when cut off by some drongo in traffic, unless it’s an ambo or a firie; and sometimes that can end up in a biffo, especially if it’s some truckie in a semi from Tassie or Newie or Rocky. We really do like to have a bikkie or a sanger in the arvo with a cuppa, and a smashed avo toast with mushies for brekkie. And sometimes we head out to pick some grog up at the bottlo to chuck in the esky; we’d be devo if there’s no Crownies there. My wife has just got a job with the Salvos, but she does not deal directly with deros or povvos or housos [that last one is not in the Wikipedia list]. Tracey Bryan talks like that in Brissie; it’s a shame I didn’t catch up with her for Chrissie, but I had to stick around with the relos.
Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi.
Gotta get back to work from my (non-smoking) smoko; we got fined for not paying our rego last week, on the way to the servo, and I gotta pay it off. It’s enough to make you put on your sunnies and chuck a sickie, I tell ya. The pollies upped the rego price for revenue; that’s what the journos say. The Seppos would never fine you like that, tell you what.
(This is actually not that exaggerated. And I don’t see what the fuss is about with Crown Lager; I’ll take Cab Sav over that any day.)
What’s the most unusual script/alphabet?
A close companion to What in your opinion is the ugliest/most unappealing script?
Cultural familiarity is going to defuse anyone’s opinion; so you won’t get many responses nominating Latin, or anything originating on the same continent as Latin.
Is it Lontara alphabet, optimised to be written on palm leaves? Is it Vai syllabary, which aesthetically occupies a middle ground between a syllabary (which it is) and hieroglyphics? Is it Ogham, which reduces letters to tally strokes?
I’m going to go with Duployan. Duployan is a French shorthand system, and Duployan was used to write down Chinook Jargon. That’s why it has been added to Unicode: Duployan (Unicode block).
As a shorthand, Duployan was designed for easy and fluent joining together of characters. What it was not designed for was straightforward rendering in either print or a computer screen. Read the rules for rendering the script in the 2009 proposal to include Duployan in Unicode, or the Unicode Technical Note Duployan Shorthand, and wince.
Like this kibbitzing site says: Crazy On Tap – Unicode 7
That Duployan by the way is an obscure form of shorthand that was proposed for a small number of weird languages, but which actually never caught on. All those languages use different orthographies now. Duployan is impossible to render using standard font engines because the shapes can combine in infinite combinations, and do stuff like the end of one segment connects to the start of the next, and they can rotate. It would be easier to implement rendering of fancy calligraphy or handwriting that looks totally real.
“Duployan orienting vowels are written by rotating the vowel to match the incoming angle of the preceding character, then mirrored along the axis of that character to avoid the following character crossing.”
Good luck updating your font renderer to handle this character range.
Could toponyms “Trebižat” (in Herzegovina) and “Trebizond” (in Turkey) be related?
Trebizond is derived from the Ancient Greek Trapezous (genitive Trapezountos, hence Modern Greek Trapezounda), meaning ‘table-like’, and referring to the mountain formation in the area.
Per People and Culture: Trebižat River,
There are two theories on how the river got its name. The first one says that it was named “Trebižat” because it escapes from the surface three times. According to the second theory, the name comes from the Italian “il trebizatto”, meaning the river is rich in eels.
So, unlikely, and I wouldn’t have thought there’s a clear reason why you’d name the river after such a far-off city anyway. Especially when the river gets a different name each of the nine times it resurfaces above ground to begin with (Trebižat (river) – Wikipedia)—so none of the originally named instances were particularly long or, I’d have thought, widely known.
Can hendiadys ever have singular agreement?
Found one!
Τοῦτο δέ φημι, ἀδελφοί, ὅτι σὰρξ καὶ αἷμα βασιλείαν Θεοῦ κληρονομῆσαι οὐ δύναται, οὐδὲ ἡ φθορὰ τὴν ἀφθαρσίαν κληρονομεῖ.
“Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”
The verb for cannot is singular in the Greek.
See also On Hendiadys in Greek. Nothing useful there, though it does mention that hendiadys is routinely ignored in accounts of Classical Greek—but noted in accounts of Biblical Greek.
A cis lament for the Greek language
Today, I felt sad for the Greek language.
As I was describing on Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes?, Greek has withstood the pressure to make like the Western languages for millennia. Oh, the common folk borrowed words from Latin and Turkish and Italian and Albanian, but scholarly vocabulary? Borrow from Latin? Screw that, we taught those beef-eaters everything they know. So for millennia, every scholarly term of Latin origin was meticulously calqued into Greek elements.
We had a great run of it. The run’s pretty much over. There’s some valiant work to keep calquing westernisms, but today I came across an instance where we just gave up.
The instance, maybe not that surprisingly, is vocabulary about gender, which has undergone upheaval in the last decade or so.
For links to what’s happened, see the linked answer. I’m drawing on the reports of Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou, a trans woman who was involved in coining native terms (and abandoned them) (transgender = διεμφυλικός, Η δήθεν ανακοίνωση των μουσουλμάνων και τα ψέματα (;) του Άδωνη), and on perusal of Greek Wikipedia.
Greek runs into a few problems when trying to render the concepts transgender, intersex, and cis.
- Greek does not differentiate between gender and sex. They’re both phylon (phlyum). To render the English distinction, Greek has to resort to ‘biological gender’ vs ‘social gender’. Which makes the distinction much clearer, but is also awkward.
- Greek does not differentiate between the prefixes trans– and inter-. Both are rendered as dia-, meaning ‘across’.
- Greek does not have a notion of cis– as a prefix at all. It certainly has a notion of ‘this side of the river’ or ‘this side of the mountain’ in place names; but that notion is expressed as mesa vs exō ‘Inner vs Outer’; e.g. Mesa Mani and Exo Mani. It’s not a notion that you can usefully contrast with trans-.
Greek rather cluelessly called transgender people travesti ‘transvestites’ for a while. (To be fair, most people did, including transgender people themselves.) When it faced having to render transsexual, and then transgender… it got stuck.
(Cross-dressers, at least, was much easier to render in Greek: travesti has been replaced by par-endyt-ikos. That’s para- as in para-military: unconventionally dressing, if you like.)
Neofotistou and other trans people got together and came up with something ingenious to render both intersex and transgender. Naively, you could calque it as dia-phylos or dia-phyl-ikos ‘inter-gender, trans-gender’. But because dia– ‘across’ means both inter and trans, that doesn’t get you far. Never mind trying to differentiate sex and gender in the name—that’s just hopeless in Greek.
What they did was, pick up the adjective em-phylos ‘in-gender’ (or ‘in-tribe’—because the two words are not coincidentally related: gender was first identified as a ‘tribe’ of people). The adjective was already in use for a while, to use ‘within a tribe’; it’s a synonym of emphylios, which is used for ‘civil war’ (within a tribe). There was a biological use of em-phylos, to refer to reproduction in which both genders were involved. Latterly, em-phylos refers to the adjective ‘gender’ as in gender studies or gender roles; phenomena that gender is embedded in (‘in-gender’, ‘gendered’).
Neofotistou’s group decided to differentiate between phyl-ikos ‘sex-related’ and em-phyl-ikos ‘relating to the in-gender’, but they then interpreted em-phylos as ‘the gender one is born with’. So intersex is dia-phyl-ikos ‘across sex’ (across the two sexes); but transgender is di-em-phyl-ikos ‘across the in-sex’ (differentiated from the sex of birth).
You’ll see both diaphylikos and diemphylikos used online to render ‘transgender’. But what you’ll see overwhelmingly is trans and transdzender. Including by Neofotistou herself, who dismisses her coinages as pedantic and clinical.
I’m not sure what you *would* do with cis in this case; Greek Wikipedia just gives up and contrasts Τρανς – Βικιπαίδεια with Cisgender – Βικιπαίδεια, abbreviated cis or μη τρανς ‘non trans’. If people cared about using Greek terms, you could go with emphylikos ‘of the in-sex’ (sex of birth), or to make the point more explicitly, adiemphylikos ‘not across the in-sex’.
No hits for either on Google. Noone’s even trying any more.
I don’t know that I can convey what a feeling of loss I have, to have seen this. Greek-speakers themselves are used to using English terms for modern concepts, and they won’t see what the fuss is about. English-speakers are likely relieved that Greek-speakers use their terms.
But… it’s seeing a language that held out for millennia, saying “screw your Latinate vocabulary, we taught you beef-eaters everything you know”… crumple.
A small thing to get hung up on, perhaps. And after all, quem patronum rogaturus, cum vix justus sit securus: German Quora is full of programming questions, with half their terminology in English. I wish I could find it again (Quora Search), but I just saw a question there about which the most popular programming languages were in Chemical Engineering—and so help me, Chemical Engineering was in English. Didn’t those guys invent that discipline? And all the other disciplines in existence?
This… is what made me sad today.