Topic: Tag BUR: Symbols, Glyphs, Runes, and Alphabet

The bulk update request #13395 is pending approval.

create alias glyph (0) -> glyphs (222)
create alias rune (139) -> runes (2562) # duplicate of alias #72369
create alias alphabets (0) -> alphabet (189)
create implication glyphs (222) -> symbol (42450)
create implication hieroglyphic_text (1130) -> glyphs (222)
create implication runes (2562) -> glyphs (222)
create implication nordic_runes (58) -> runes (2562)

Reason: Trying to consolidate these. Do discuss if you have a better idea.

Definitions:

• Symbol is defined on e621 simply as "depictions of various glyphs and symbols."
• Wikipedia defines it as "a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, relationship, or mathematical formula."
• Glyphs are undefined on e621.
• Wikipedia defines it as "any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is 'the specific shape, design, or representation of a character'. It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface (or computer font), of an element of written language."
• Runes is defined on e621 as "strange symbols for the purpose of magic", symbols of "a writing system ... created by the Norse", or "for art purposes ... may also be 'random squiggles'."
• Wikipedia defines it as "letters in a set of related alphabets, known as runic rows, runic alphabets or futharks, native to the Germanic peoples."
• Alphabet is undefined on e621, but it is defined in the letter wiki as "letters listed in order" while keeping it distinct from the singular letter_(alphabet).
• Wikipedia defines it as "a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols, called letters, to more or less represent particular sounds in a spoken language."

In short, (1) symbol is broadly any kind of mark that represents an idea, object, etc., (2) glyphs are symbols on a writing system, (3) runes are random squiggles, magic runes, or nordic_runes, and (4) alphabet is the a full set of letter_(alphabet).

Proposal:

• Aliases for redundancy.
• Imply glyphs to symbol instead of directly aliasing it, because the latter has a broader definition that isn't limited to symbols from a writing system.
• Imply hieroglyphic_text and nordic_runes to glyphs because they are both symbols of a writing system.
• Imply runes to symbol because the former is generically used in artworks as any strange magical symbol or random squiggles, second to being a Nordic writing system. Imply runes to glyphs instead.
• Imply nordic_runes to runes because the former is a type of rune.

Pending discussion:

• The discussion about alias #72369 on topic #46437 sought to disambiguate rune, but @spe mentions seeing nothing wrong with it. Thus, should we continue with the alias or disambiguate?
• What to do with letter_(alphabet) and alphabet.

I think a runes -> glyphs implication might be fine since they generally still look like language symbols, even if completely fictional or just made up on the spot. Calling runes "glyphs but magical" seems like a fine definition for our purposes.

spe said:
I think a runes -> glyphs implication might be fine since they generally still look like language symbols, even if completely fictional or just made up on the spot. Calling runes "glyphs but magical" seems like a fine definition for our purposes.

While I agree that runes can be a subset of glyphs, I'm not sure if referring to the former as "glyphs but magical" would be a good idea.
Glyphs can be "magical" too, such as in the form of sigils!

To make things easier to understand, I feel we can distinguish them as:

• Glyphs are any form of marks or symbols used as an element of a written language. It could be a real-life (e.g., hieroglyphic_text) or fictional language (e.g., aurebesh_text).
• Glyphs must be physically present in the scene itself (such as on a character or an object), as opposed to being a text overlay.
• The Latin alphabet, numbers, and most writing systems we use today are all technically considered as glyphs, but they will be excluded for practical purposes.
• Runes, also known as runic rows, runic alphabets or futharks, are the letters in a set of related alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. The most well-known and oldest type of runes were created by the Norse sometime before 150AD, which came to be colloquially known as "Nordic runes". In modern times, runic alphabets have been used in the occult & paganism as well as in fictional languages for the fantasy genre, such as the Cirth runes by J. R. R. Tolkien.
• Same restrictions apply here, as a subset of glyphs.
• Runes can be a real-life language, fictional language, or complete gibberish. For actual translatable text written in runes, it should be tagged with runic_text as well.

thegreatwolfgang said:
While I agree that runes can be a subset of glyphs, I'm not sure if referring to the former as "glyphs but magical" would be a good idea.
Glyphs can be "magical" too, such as in the form of sigils!

To make things easier to understand, I feel we can distinguish them as:

• Glyphs are any form of marks or symbols used as an element of a written language. It could be a real-life (e.g., hieroglyphic_text) or fictional language (e.g., aurebesh_text).
• Glyphs must be physically present in the scene itself (such as on a character or an object), as opposed to being a text overlay.
• The Latin alphabet, numbers, and most writing systems we use today are all technically considered as glyphs, but they will be excluded for practical purposes.
• Runes, also known as runic rows, runic alphabets or futharks, are the letters in a set of related alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. The most well-known and oldest type of runes were created by the Norse sometime before 150AD, which came to be colloquially known as "Nordic runes". In modern times, runic alphabets have been used in the occult & paganism as well as in fictional languages for the fantasy genre, such as the Cirth runes by J. R. R. Tolkien.
• Same restrictions apply here, as a subset of glyphs.
• Runes can be a real-life language, fictional language, or complete gibberish. For actual translatable text written in runes, it should be tagged with runic_text as well.

Maybe I'm missing something, but at this point it seems like runes and glyphs are functionally identical and should probably just be aliased together.

spe said:
Maybe I'm missing something, but at this point it seems like runes and glyphs are functionally identical and should probably just be aliased together.

Glyphs can be any random written script (e.g., Latin alphabets) or a set of unique symbols (e.g., Wingdings) that are used to build a sentence.
Runes are a specific type of glyphs consisting of runic alphabets (i.e., ᛖᚲᛊᚨᛗᛈᛚᛖ).

Aliasing them together would cause runic symbols to be no longer searchable.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Glyphs can be any random written script (e.g., Latin alphabets) or a set of unique symbols (e.g., Wingdings) that are used to build a sentence.
Runes are a specific type of glyphs consisting of runic alphabets (i.e., ᛖᚲᛊᚨᛗᛈᛚᛖ).

Aliasing them together would cause runic symbols to be no longer searchable.

Okay, but then that still goes back to my initial suggestion of having runes imply glyphs rather than skipping them and implying symbol.

spe said:
Okay, but then that still goes back to my initial suggestion of having runes imply glyphs rather than skipping them and implying symbol.

Yeah, I will include the changes into the BUR.

thegreatwolfgang said:
To make things easier to understand, I feel we can distinguish them as:

• Glyphs are any form of marks or symbols used as an element of a written language. It could be a real-life (e.g., hieroglyphic_text) or fictional language (e.g., aurebesh_text).
• Glyphs must be physically present in the scene itself (such as on a character or an object), as opposed to being a text overlay.
• The Latin alphabet, numbers, and most writing systems we use today are all technically considered as glyphs, but they will be excluded for practical purposes.

That seems unnecessarily arbitrary. You want to exclude Latin characters because they're so common, but would that mean Hebrew text would still be glyphs? Or Japanese text/CJK characters? What about Russian text? "Glyph" is too generic of a concept to keep as its own tag IMO (like you say, most if not all text is technically glyphs), when people are likely to have their own incompatible ideas of what distinguishes glyphs from text.

watsit said:
That seems unnecessarily arbitrary. You want to exclude Latin characters because they're so common, but would that mean Hebrew text would still be glyphs? Or Japanese text/CJK characters? What about Russian text?

All of that are technically glyphs, but I want to exclude them for practical reasons.
Otherwise, any generic object with text on it (e.g., book, billboard, stop sign, etc.) would be tagged with glyphs, rendering the tag pointless.

It should only be used for non-traditional symbols that forms a writing system, which can range from real languages like hieroglyphic_text, to fictional ones like Elvish runes, to complete untranslatable alien gibberish.

"Glyph" is too generic of a concept to keep as its own tag IMO (like you say, most if not all text is technically glyphs), when people are likely to have their own incompatible ideas of what distinguishes glyphs from text.

Let's put it this way and hypothetically alias glyphs to symbol.
Then, let's take instances of text and see whether or not it is appropriate to tag every one of them as glyphs.

If we did not include exclusions, all of them should be tagged with symbol because the individual alphabets are all technically glyphs.
If we truly want to be technically accurate, we would have implied text to symbol, but we obviously do not do that.

watsit said:
That seems unnecessarily arbitrary. You want to exclude Latin characters because they're so common, but would that mean Hebrew text would still be glyphs? Or Japanese text/CJK characters? What about Russian text? "Glyph" is too generic of a concept to keep as its own tag IMO (like you say, most if not all text is technically glyphs), when people are likely to have their own incompatible ideas of what distinguishes glyphs from text.

Just a point of pedentry but, Russian can be written with any alphabet however it's natively written with the cyrillic alphabet (as are many other slavic languages like Ukrainian and Blugarian), so technically most instances of russian_text should also be tagged with cyrillic_text

thegreatwolfgang said:
All of that are technically glyphs, but I want to exclude them for practical reasons.
Otherwise, any generic object with text on it (e.g., book, billboard, stop sign, etc.) would be tagged with glyphs, rendering the tag pointless.

That's kind of the point. glyphs can apply to any text, so to be practical it needs to be restricted. But it feels too arbitrary here to me, where nordic_runes count as glyphs (through the runes implication), while cjk_characters don't, but hieroglyphic_text does. The distinction seems based on personal vibes, and different people will have their own standards for whether to tag glyphs or not.

thegreatwolfgang said:
If we did not include exclusions, all of them should be tagged with symbol because the individual alphabets are all technically glyphs.
If we truly want to be technically accurate, we would have implied text to symbol, but we obviously do not do that.

It's not really an issue to exclude using tags on what is technically correct for practicality reasons, see anthro and humanoid. But where those tags are too important for a furry archive making it necessary to have something, the glyphs tag seems a bit too superfluous to have such an unclear distinction, compared to the text and runes tags we already have.

watsit said:
But it feels too arbitrary here to me ... while cjk_characters don't, but hieroglyphic_text does. The distinction seems based on personal vibes, and different people will have their own standards for whether to tag glyphs or not.

The cjk_character tag mentioned that it "should be used only when a CJK character appears in isolation" and "does not apply to any instance of Chinese text, Japanese text or Korean text."
I think this feels arbitrary to me as well, but they are nevertheless kept distinct.

What if we kept *_text completely separate from glyphs and allow the latter to feature any kind of isolated letters, be it in Latin, CJK, or otherwise?
That would mean the a singular letter_(alphabet) would be considered as glyphs while any form of whole words or sentences would not.

...where nordic_runes count as glyphs (through the runes implication)...

Technically, as far as your argument goes with glyphs applying to any text, nordic_runes is not the same as runic_text.

I have thought of aliasing nordic_runes to runes since that should be the default, but runes also include "fictional runes" not related to any real-world writing systems.

thegreatwolfgang said:
The cjk_character tag mentioned that it "should be used only when a CJK character appears in isolation" and "does not apply to any instance of Chinese text, Japanese text or Korean text."
I think this feels arbitrary to me as well, but they are nevertheless kept distinct.

Being arbitrary isn't itself the problem, just whether that line is clear and useful. When "a CJK character appears in isolation" I think is fairly clear and useful, at least compared to the "Latin alphabet, numbers, and most writing systems we use today are [excluded]". Particularly if people may be prone to simply tagging glyphs in place or (or with) runes, further muddling what the tag is useful for.

thegreatwolfgang said:
What if we kept *_text completely separate from glyphs and allow the latter to feature any kind of isolated letters, be it in Latin, CJK, or otherwise?
That would mean the a singular letter_(alphabet) would be considered as glyphs while any form of whole words or sentences would not.

Feels like that would make it largely identical to letter_(alphabet).

watsit said:
Feels like that would make it largely identical to letter_(alphabet).

As far as I can tell, it is only used for Latin alphabets. If the tag name is an issue, that can be changed.

Maybe glyph ought to be an analogue for letter_(alphabet) or cjk_character in the sense that it is only used for somewhat "isolated" letters, in our case exclusively for fictional languages? So maybe we can leave out heiroglyphics and such.

spe said:
Maybe glyph ought to be an analogue for letter_(alphabet) or cjk_character in the sense that it is only used for somewhat "isolated" letters, in our case exclusively for fictional languages? So maybe we can leave out heiroglyphics and such.

letter_(alphabet) and cjk_character are largely necessary since having isolated characters like that often couldn't tell you what language it was. This was also the reason kanji was renamed to cjk_character some time back. I don't think having a glyph tag for isolated fictional language characters really helps in a similar way, given the existing letter_(alphabet), cjk_character, and runes tags.

watsit said:
letter_(alphabet) and cjk_character are largely necessary since having isolated characters like that often couldn't tell you what language it was. This was also the reason kanji was renamed to cjk_character some time back. I don't think having a glyph tag for isolated fictional language characters really helps in a similar way, given the existing letter_(alphabet), cjk_character, and runes tags.

Okay, so if we have just a floating character of some unknown or undefined language, what tag do we use for that? And I'm not talking about fictional language characters, since that tag is used for specific fictional languages and those generally have a defined alphabet already - I just mean the artist scribbling some vaguely glyphic symbol onto an object or character or something. Things that wouldn't qualify for any specific language tag. What are we calling those?

spe said:
Okay, so if we have just a floating character of some unknown or undefined language, what tag do we use for that? And I'm not talking about fictional language characters, since that tag is used for specific fictional languages and those generally have a defined alphabet already - I just mean the artist scribbling some vaguely glyphic symbol onto an object or character or something. Things that wouldn't qualify for any specific language tag. What are we calling those?

Maybe symbol (which is defined as "Depictions of various glyphs and symbols.", incidentally), or runes (which says "However, for art purposes, runes may also be 'random squiggles'."), or scribbles, or something. If they're not identifiable as a defined alphabet, I don't think you can define them as a language either. It would really depends on how they look and the context they're used in.

Something that may be worth considering is separating real-life runic characters (e.g. from older Norse writing systems), from made up fictional runes or other "random squiggles". Though I don't know how well taggers will be able to discern real ones from made up ones (I doubt I could).

watsit said:
Maybe symbol (which is defined as "Depictions of various glyphs and symbols.", incidentally), or runes (which says "However, for art purposes, runes may also be 'random squiggles'."), or scribbles, or something. If they're not identifiable as a defined alphabet, I don't think you can define them as a language either. It would really depends on how they look and the context they're used in.

Well, symbol is way too broad. That includes a ton of clearly non-linguistic symbols such as pictographics. Maybe runes and glyphs can be merged in some way, but I definitely think there are a lot of posts using glyphic symbols that can't be attributed to a specific language, and those ought to have a tag.