Tengwar on a general purpose translation site

[James Tauber]

The intellectual property rights (to the extent they may be
enforceable or at least claimed) would be in the glyph and in the
name, right?

But the Tengwar has a canonical enumeration. So TENGWAR LETTER 1 is
meaningful in the context of LOTR Appendix E without reference to the
glyph or name 'tinco' so it's not quite the same as just saying
UNICODE CHARACTER XXX01.

James

On Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 9:31 AM Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode
<unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
>
> I sort of have to agree with Ken here (hey, it happens.)  What makes
> Unicode an encoding of *characters*, what makes U+0041 mean LATIN
> CAPITAL LETTER A, is that Unicode says that's what it is. In the name,
> yes, but the name isn't dispositive (there are misnamed characters); the
> rest of the standard also counts.  It's LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A, and not
> just UNICODE CHARACTER 0041. Unless the standard stipulates, in the
> actual character names or out of them, that codepoint XXX01 really
> corresponds to TENGWAR LETTER TINCO, then, well, it might as well just
> be UNICODE CHARACTER XXX01 or as Ken says, <private-use F0001>.
>
> Also, although everyone seems focussed on the glyphs, I think that
> really isn't the issue.  If I somehow invented an entirely new and
> original set of glyphs for Klingon, and somehow got them retroactively
> canonized and used and all that stuff (or to put it another way, if I
> invented or held the copyright on the glyph forms), I don't think
> Unicode would be any more comfortable about encoding KLINGON LETTER A or
> even PIQAD LETTER A than they are now.  It's not about the pictures, and
> Unicode doesn't encode glyphs.  Encoding Tengwar is or maybe is felt to
> be... doing *something* sortakinda related to IP owned by the Tolkien
> estate, and that's the sticking point.
>
> ~mark
>
> On 3/9/22 13:57, Ken Whistler via Unicode wrote:
> >
> > On 3/9/2022 10:38 AM, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
> >>
> >> Suppose a proposal works around any IP concerns, real or imaginary,
> >> by using generic character names along the lines of CJK ideographs.
> >> Such as:
> >>
> >> U+xxx01  FICTIONAL CONSCRIPT CHARACTER-XXX01
> >> U+xxx02  FICTIONAL CONSCRIPT CHARACTER-XXX02
> >> and so forth.
> >>
> >> The charts covering the ranges could be blank with a footnote
> >> explaining that the lack of glyphs is due to IP concerns.  The
> >> proposal could refer to earlier proposals for usage examples and the
> >> proposed range need not mention any author's name or copyrighted brands.
> >>
> >> Would such a proposal have any chance of moving forward towards
> >> acceptance?
> >
> > Well, insofar as this is attempt to "encode" characters without
> > providing reference glyphs or names or any meaningful semantics, it
> > isn't much different from just using:
> >
> > U+F0001 <private-use-F0001>
> > U+F0002 <private-use-F0002>
> > ...
> >
> > I don't see the UTC going for this kind of pseudo-private-use concept.
> > The whole point of *standardizing* characters is to spell out
> > precisely what they are so that interchange is reliable.
> >
> > --Ken
> >
> >>
> >>
> >>