Re: Seeming hostility to conlang scripts?

On 5/28/26 3:16 PM, Michael De Roover via Unicode wrote:
> While the fandoms of each of these franchises are
> enormous, their conlangs' usefulness does not currently extend beyond those
> fandoms.
That's kind of true of everything: nobody uses X, except for X's 
users.  (I was trying to explain what Unicode was to someone once, and 
said that they make the official emoji lists and everything, and he said 
"yeah, but who uses those?"  Um, millions of people, every day.  "Yeah, 
but aside from them?"  Indeed, aside from people who use emoji, nobody 
uses emoji.)  This is a No True Scotsman argument.

But to the extent this argument isn't circular, it's really 
offensive.  The implication is "well, nobody outside of the fans are 
affected, so it isn't really so important."  Which is to say, the fans 
are not important.  Why is it okay to say this about fans of conlangs 
(or anything else)?  It isn't okay to say it about "Africans" or "Deaf 
people" or "Yezidis" or "Meroitic Scholars", is it?  That's the whole 
complaint about the "hostility": the implication that the needs of fans 
or nerds are somehow less important than the needs of other 
people.  That's bigotry, plain and simple.

Now, I know this statement was made in the context of pointing out the 
legal difficulties, and indeed Unicode shouldn't be expected to expose 
itself to legal liability for Africans or Yezidis or scholars either, 
but the fact that it seemed okay to say "well, it's only fans, so it's 
okay" is disturbing.

~mark