What is this glyph?

Christian Munk

I have created this glyph:



It is a combination of the top of an x and the tail of a g. It was intended to be a latin letter gamma (ɣ) made more roman and less like a greek letter gamma (γ). But I think it turned out to be more plausibly a variant of an insular g (ᵹ) or possibly a yogh (ȝ), although the resemblance is far fetched. I've even played with the thought of it being a visigothic z (ꝣ).

The point is: I like the glyph, but I don't know where to put it. Do you  have any ideas? Have you seen a similar glyph before? What did it represent?

Jongseong Park

My first thought is that it somewhat resembles the vertically stacked version of the old Cyrillic letter Uk (scroll down for an image), but it wouldn't really be a plausible variant for it. I'd be interested to see what other people come up with.

Maxim Zhukov

This looks suspiciously close to the l.c. ksi in Peter the Great’s ‘Civil Type’:

Source: Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti [‘St. Petersburg Record’]. Addendum of Friday, 4 January 1734.

Albert_Jan_Pool

Linguists, software engineers and other typographic laypeople have defined numerous Unicode slots that are practically not being used. They left us with many slots which are only the remains of outdated technology that once served their needs. Willingly or unwillingly, the slot fillers amongst us keep supporting these positions. We are leaving up the users with crowded glyph tables, hundreds of useless kerning pairs, stylistic sets, OT-features and many other things of which no one will ever get a clue.
My conclusion: I think we should turn this around, invent more letterforms and apply for Unicode slots for them ;–)

Christian Munk

@Jongseong Park Yes, I can see the resemblance to Cyrillic Letter Uk (ꙋ). That of course means the glyph is also similar to the Latin Letter OU-ligature (ȣ). It seems those two glyphs are normally standing on the baseline and may reach up into ascender height, but I guess one could have them descend instead.

@Maxim Zhukov. Whoa, I had no idea the Cyrillic Letter Ksi (ѯ) could look like that! I did have a suspicion, that the caron-like shape on the top was not a diacritic, but more of an integrated part of the letter. But I wouldn't have guessed, that someone would see that part as central to the glyph, and leave the rest as a squiggly descender. Nice picture sample too, thank you!

@Albert_Jan_Pool Sounds like a cool way to go about it. So I should find a specific use for this symbol, make it popular, and thereby create the demand for a Unicode codepoint for it

Maxim Zhukov

Here is the showing of the Petrine Ksi in all sizes, crafted by His Majesty’s most gracious order:

Christian Munk said:

<…> Nice picture sample too, thank you!

Photo courtesy of Danila Vorobiev.

Fernando Díaz

@Albert_Jan_Pool reading what you've said, it would be awesome to have a sort of list of outdated glyphs, so, like you've said, we can take advantage of them, don't you think?

Albert_Jan_Pool

As far as I know, the Unicode Consortium describes some of the slots as being left-overs from older systems, standards etc. In some cases they also write that such slots are mainly used for backwards compatibility usage. I do not know wether anyone has created any listings from this. Maybe it is the different kind of compatibility issues, the spread  and time frame in which they are being resolved which keeps one from setting up a general list of ‘junk slots’.