sort of OT: politics and scripts

From: Elaine Keown (keown@altavista.com)
Date: Wed Nov 15 2000 - 15:11:46 EST


Hello,

A similar question to the question of new Chinese characters and new versions of characters for Lakota, but an order of magnitude larger, is the question of ongoing or about-to-hit-us script changes in Central Asia.

In the 1920s-1940s, under a series of Soviet language policy changes, many Central Asian languages were converted from Arabic script to Roman to Cyrillic (or some different permutation even). Jewish Central Asian languages were converted from Hebrew to Cyrillic.

Now as the independent republics take control, there is evidence that the abandonment of Cyrillic has started, and there is a return to Arabic script. But not "plain vanilla" Arabic script, but the extended Arabic scripts with extra symbols......

This gives Unicode an odd "legacy code" problem, indeed.---Elaine Keown

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