- Great detective work re the azimuth finding for the glyph, but I believe the link to a sextant is tenuous at best. The author says it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian. That’s not correct. The tool for doing that is an azimuth ring sitting on a compass which allows the user to obtain the angle relative to north (the azimuth) between the user’s local meridian and a landmark.
A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier.
I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale.
Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
- I prefer to think these characters have an antimemetic field that causes anyone who learns their true meaning to forget shortly after.
- context: a follow up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012865 (2022), a post which started the hunt for the mysterios origin of this unicode symbol.
- One of the interesting things about Unicode is how many symbols exist that almost no one encounters in normal software.
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
- This is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it.
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon
- I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a bit of a chore.
by vishnuharidas
0 subcomment
- “RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW”: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/237C
- > it can, of course, be turned sideways to measure an azimuth with respect to an arbitrary meridian
Ah, of course :)
by foxglacier
1 subcomments
- I was wondering how much information was being lost whenever a font designer re-created that without knowing what it's supposed to be. It turns out they all put the arrow through the corner of the right angle which adds confusion by making it look like 3D cartesian axes. One of them made the zig-zag a curve which would be completely wrong by the sextant reason. But I guess this is how symbols and language drift over time.
- The Fonts in Use page from Berthold is fascinating.
https://fontsinuse.com/foundry/159/berthold
by russellbeattie
1 subcomments
- The photos of the symbol catalogs are incredidble. You really have to admire the precision printing they did in the early 1900s. All those glyphs were created by hand. I'm not exactly sure what sort of lithography process was used (I can't imagine they weren't casting them in lead), but there was definitely nothing digital about it. The results are amazing.
- Now can we find an example where this symbol was actually used in practice?
by kindkang2024
2 subcomments
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by cookiengineer
3 subcomments
- I didn't know that this is a mystery?
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
- The existence of characters that need this much work to explain suggests to be that unicode is bloated. Not the only thing that suggests that, either.
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