In Memoriam: Fredrick Brennan
Fred Brennan, who passed away January 10, 2026, was involved in work on Unicode, though it is not often mentioned in remembrances of him (such as Wikipedia article and this remembrance). He was also a supporter of SEI.
My interaction with Fred began in 2019, when he expressed an interest in participating in the Unicode Script Ad Hoc (SAH, now Script Encoding Working Group) of which I was Chair at the time. He took part in meetings through 2022, and acted as scribe for several of them.
Fred took an interest in the scripts and languages of East and Southeast Asia. He penned several successful proposals, including proposals for three Baybayin (Tagalog) characters (L2/19-258R, L2/20-272) and 13 Kana characters (L2/20-209R). All of the proposed characters appeared in Unicode version 14.0 (released Sept 2021). He also provided the font for the characters he proposed and for U+1F7D9 NINE POINTED WHITE STAR, often associated with the Baháʼí faith.
Fred was always very cordial to me and willing to listen, taking on board comments from those in the Unicode SAH. His proposals were replete with examples of proposed characters and details on the glyphs.
As a cat person, I always liked his email address “copypaste@kittens.ph” and his green cat image.
Thank you, Fred, for your contributions to Unicode and generous donation to SEI!
