Today’s Unicode calligraphy highlights the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for the glottal stop, the sound between the syllables of “uh-oh”. (It can also be heard if you say the phrase “glottal stop” in a Cockney accent!)
In Squamish orthography, the glottal stop is represented by the digit 7 instead of ʔ, as in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh.
Today’s Unicode calligraphy is the good old ampersand. The name for the character comes from “and per se and”, but despite all sources agreeing on that fact, I couldn’t figure out what the longer phrase actually meant.
Looking at older sources, I think the phrase is supposed to be parsed ”& per se: and”. That is, ”& per se” means the character ”&” by itself, and the second “and” is a spelling-bee-style repetition to indicate that you have finished spelling the word “and”. So one might spell “wear and tear” out loud by saying:
W-E-A-R wear; & per se and; T-E-A-R tear
The same was apparently true for the words I, a, and O, so our national anthem would be spelled “O per se: O; C-A-N-A-D-A: Canada”.
Today’s Unicode calligraphy is a roman numeral I had no idea existed!
As it turns out, the system of Roman numerals I learned as a child (I=1, V=5, X=10, L=50, C=100, D=500, and M=1000) is a medieval standard. The ancient Romans did not often write numbers much larger than a hundred, and when they did, they used a slightly different system.
Composite symbols with a backwards C were used for big numbers: IↃ=500, CIↃ=1000, IↃↃ=5000, and CCIↃↃ = 10000. The modern numeral for five hundred, “D”, comes from writing IↃ more concisely. There are also concise forms for one thousand (ↀ), five thousand (ↁ), and ten thousand (ↂ) although those forms are now of only historical interest.
I need to practice my calligraphic dots and circles, so today’s character comes from Braille.
Did you know that Braille is slightly different in every language? The twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet are generally the same across languages, but beyond that there is a lot of variation. For example, I wrote ⠩, which represents:
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have their own entirely independent Brailles. The symbol ⠩ represents the syllable く (ku) in Japanese Braille, the final “yan” in Mainland Chinese Braille, and the vowel ㅠ (yu) in Korean Braille.
Calligraphy is one of several hobbies I’ve started dabbling with. I’m practicing by writing information sheets for random Unicode characters, which gives me an excuse to share some typographic trivia!
Today’s entry is U+237C RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW, also known as angzarr. This is an unusual “ghost character” that nobody knows the meaning of. Jonathan Chan has an ongoing series of blog posts tracing the history of the character to the Monotype foundry between 1954 and 1963, but is no closer to discovering the original purpose.