If you can copy-paste a string of letters and symbols from one text field to another, or if the message you wrote on your device displays correctly when you send it to a friend, you've benefited from the background work of the Unicode Consortium. If you've ever gone into the "insert symbol" menu in a document and poked around some of those strange and beautiful symbols, from hieroglyphs to arrows to emoji? Yup, that's Unicode too.
In this episode, we get enthusiastic about how electronic devices know what symbols exist, aka character encoding! We talk about the massive list of symbols that your phone carries around, how that list (aka Unicode) came into existence, and why it's still growing a bit every year (it's partly about emoji but there's also so much more). Gretchen went to the annual meeting of the Unicode Consortium a few months ago and she got to show off her esoteric Unicode symbols scarf (yes, people liked it!) and learn many things, like the surprisingly complicated story of why Mongolian is still so hard to encode. Plus, our favourite obscure Unicode symbols, because there are just so many great ones to choose from. (Have one yourself? Share it with us on the Discord!)
Announcements
We're doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! It will be a live Q&A for you, our wonderful patreons, all about fan fave topic: swearing! We'll be hosting this session on our Discord server, and it will be available as an edited-for-legibility recording as a bonus episode. Become a patron to join us for the liveshow.
LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly. We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.
Listen to the episode about Unicode and font encoding and get access to 59 more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.