Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the metrical triseme (⏗), tetraseme (⏘) and pentraseme (⏙) in the Miscellaneous Symbols section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate scansion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols - which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm and meter in a poetic context. However, the Expletive infixation page uses the alternate term prosody in perhaps more of a formal linguistic sense. PS: prosody & scansion. Certainly on the cryptic crossword one of these decades...
Can I ask what library you use for your roguelikes? Last time I was working with ncurses, I found it doesn't support unicode, and wncurses isn't well support on the Mac.
I use a few libraries. The roguelike one I use is rotLove[0] for LÖVE[1] for Lua[2], which is a port of rot.js[3], which is itself a libtcod[4] port. However, fonts are handled by LÖVE. I have a bug filed with them right now where Chinese text crashes though, so I wouldn't call it ultra stable. Then again, it's just a fun project to learn Lua, so I'm not in a hurry.
Didn't this happen for spellings in various ortography reforms? I think german had the largest one in recent years and iirc there was a deprecation period for old spellings.
An English spelling reform would be a blessing but almost certainly isn't going to happen. And even if something would work it probably would lead to more fun akin to color-colour.