What's the process for proposing a symbol in the Unicode table?

[James Kass]

On 2024-02-17 11:26 PM, Freek Dijkstra via Unicode wrote:
> I almost get the feeling that Unicode has overlooked a (small) 
> category of these symbols, and only included the English ones. Sadly, 
> my knowledge of those other symbols is limited, so I can only make a 
> proposal for the Flourish of Approval. But just to check: Unicode 
> codepoints represent a glyph, not a meaning, right? So the English ✓ 
> and Swedish ✓ have the same codepoint, even though their meaning is 
> different?

Unicode encodes characters rather than glyphs.  Please see 
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr17/tr17-3.html for more information, 
specifically section 2.1 for illustrations.  The check mark (✓) has one 
code point because of convention:  there was no distinction between 
Swedish and English usage of the mark in pre-existing character sets.

The Unicode repertoire might be perceived as favoring English symbols, 
but we need to keep in mind that the original goal of Unicode was to 
standardize existing character sets into a universal encoding which 
would serve everyone.  Many of those existing character sets were 
developed by English speaking users, hence the possible appearance of 
favoritism.  Likewise, an even larger batch of those existing character 
sets were developed by “Westerners”, which can give the appearance of 
favoritism to non-Western users. But over time, many non-English and 
non-Western characters have been added to the Unicode repertoire because 
somebody took the time and made the effort to submit an encoding 
proposal and escort it through the approval process.