[Foundation-l] What is on the back of the logo?

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> 2008/7/24 Ting Chen <Wing.Philopp at gmx.de>:
>>> Total, leaving aside the caps, thirty or so. Forty if we fill in the
>>> missing tiles. Can we rustle up thirty more visually different
>>> characters? I'm sure we can... anyone have a handy list of what
>>> writing systems we've used so far?
>>
>> Here is a list of writing systems:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems
>>
>> And we can surely ignore writing systems that would never make to our projects (egypt hierographs and other dead languages), so in total, it is not so much
>
> Thanks to Guillom (who found it when I couldn't), a list:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logos_and_slogans#Alphabets_represented_in_the_logo
>
> Armenian - [blank] - [blank] - [blank]
> Khmer - [blank] - Japanese - Klingon
> Tibetan - Greek - Latin - Arabic
> Devangari - Chinese - Cyrillic - Hangul
> [unknown] - Kannada - Hebrew - Thai
>
> So, thirty more to play with. I would like on principle for us to
> include a dead system or two - even if we don't work in them, it's a
> nice nod to include cuneiform or demotic Egyptian. I would have said
> 'Mayan', but that's far too complex for us!  (Another dead system
> which we might want to consider: Ogham, since it has a very nice "ui-"
> character, Uilleann.)
>
> I can see why we might not want too, though, so I won't argue this
> much - but I'd like to consider it...
>
> We may also want to think about quietly substituting Klingon for
> something else, given we've closed tlh.wp!

It would be great to see a dead language in the mix.  As an example of
how it ties into Wikipedia, an extension has been created in order to
render hieroglyphs, and it is in use on Wikipedia articles about
related topics, so these languages are not excluded from the mission
of Wikipedia entirely.  They would be a better choice than Klingon!

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiHiero

I had always assumed the missing pieces represented lost or dead
languages, and the symbolism was that we didnt want to loose any more
knowledge/languages/etc.  I'm off to find and read the backstory, if
there is one.

Perhaps dead languages can be used in the 3D model for the pieces that
are missing in the current logo - they would not be coveted spots
anyway if they were missing from the default logo.

--
John Vandenberg