LINGUIST List 2.370

Sunday, 28 July 1991

Disc: Character Encoding

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Directory

1. Ken Whistler, Re: Queries
2. Peter Salus, Re: Queries

In response to queries posted to:
	Linguist List: Vol-2-366. Friday, 26 July 1991.
Re: Character encoding
Linguists had better hope that the Unicode Consortium succeeds
in getting general adoption of Unicode, together with some
control over the continuing process of adding scripts and
character to the standard. The people who work on Unicode
care about dead languages (and even more radical--dead scripts),
as well as obscure ones. In addition to working on Ethiopian,
Mongolian, Sinhala, Khmer, and Burmese for the next edition,
we have proposals in the hopper for Syriac, Lepcha, Egyptian
hieroglyphics, Linear B, and lots else. I can guarantee you
that the Danish national standards committee isn't going to
care much about such things.
Re: X-gate
If the BCCI scandal keeps unfolding and intersects
the latest nomination for Director of the CIA, we may
also have a Gatesgate in the works. AbuDhabigate?
--Ken Whistler

Rick Russom's query is a good one. The answer is
that no one is protecting quail-chicks, Mayan
elephants, yogh, wyn, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian,
or Hittite cuneiform, etc. Nor, as far as I can tell
from ISO DIS 10646, has digamma been included in Greek.
I brought some of this up at an ISO meeting in 1989,
but even the Swedish delegate thought I was extreme
(though he admitted an interest in edh, thorn, and vowels
with slashes through them, o over them [aa], and
digraphs and umlauts).
King Alfred, Hattusilis, etc., are dead.
Peter H. Salus