This was fun!  On Tuesday night (9. Sept 2008), there was a tribute to the 20th anniversary of Unicode at the 32nd Internationalization and Unicode Conference.  I wrote this in a creative fury on Monday afternoon. The anniversary celebration was at an evening reception. It was very funny and enjoyable. Several other people contributed amusing tributes. My song appeared to be well-received. I hope you enjoy it.

Unicode Doggerel

(Sung to the tune of  “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”, by Gilbert and Sullivan.)

I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme,
a million scalars, astral planes, and UTFs like six-&-teen,
and UAX and UTR, collation, bidi, properties,
I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme.

I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme,
with Latin, Greek and IPA, Cyrillic Hebrew Syriac,
Bengali Tamil Arabic,  MaLAY-a-LAM Ethiopic,
Sinhala Thai Lao Kannada, Tagalog Runic Ogham Greek…

Syllabics Aboriginal, Mongolian and Balinese,
Math-maticals, and Braille, Khmer, plus Glagolitic, Latin-C,
And OCR and Number Forms and Letterlike Symbology,
Combining Diacriticals, Box Drawing, Dingbats, Currency!

There’s Bopomofo, Hiragana, Coptic and Han Radicals,
and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan
and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan
and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan and Unihan…

And Yi, and More Cyrillic, Latin, someday soon some Javanese
& Hangul Hangul Hangul Hangul, Surrogate Points, Private Use,
The Arab Presentation forms, the Halfwidth and f-E-ff,
I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme!

One hundred thousand characters and lots of meta-dater,…
But still no Klingon coded there, you’ll have to come back later!

(See my Unicode Doggerel page for more about these lyrics.)

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