From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Sep 08 2005 - 19:31:47 CDT
> > Has anyone compiled a list of supported languages for UTF8, UTF16?
>
> Just in case there might be a misunderstanding here: UTF-8 and UTF-16 can
> be used to encode the *same* languages. Please see the FAQ about UTFs.
And to add to Rick's clarification, lest there still be a
misunderstanding, UTF-8 and UTF-16 are simply completely
equivalent encoding forms of the Unicode character encoding.
So any text representable in one is representable in the
other.
Furthermore, the Unicode Standard shouldn't be viewed
as having some list of "supported languages". Its explicit
scope is universal. And the relevant unit of support
really is *script*. Some scripts are not yet "supported"
(meaning characters of that script are not encoded), but in
every case I am aware of at this point, we are talking
about minority scripts for languages which can be and often
are written using other scripts as well -- which *are* encoded
in the Unicode Standard. Or we are talking about historic
scripts used in writing languages which are often written
in transliteration anyway in scholarly documents.
So the short answer to the question is that written forms
for *ALL* languages are now supported by the Unicode Standard.
It is a quite difficult task now to come up with examples of
any language, anywhere in the world, which cannot be adequately
represented in at least one of the existing scripts in
the standard.
Of course it is easy to point to writing systems not yet
covered: Egyptian hieroglyphics aren't in the standard yet,
for example. But if I wanted to write Ancient Egyptian, it
is often done in Latin transliteration -- and all the characters
needed for that are in the standard, and have been for some
time now.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Sep 08 2005 - 19:33:21 CDT