Re: Languages supported by UTF8 and UTF16

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Sep 09 2005 - 19:36:42 CDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Languages supported by UTF8 and UTF16"

    Philippe said:

    > I see little interest for now in supporting Klingon,

    True. In part because the Klingon *script* is so poorly
    defined that it hardly deserves the term "script", and I've
    never seen a decent proposal for it that made any sense.
    In part because Klingon the concept is so radioactive that
    it makes business managers and European standardizers go
    ballistic, so even considering it is counterproductive to
    the development of the standard. But mostly because Klingon
    the *language* has always been supported fully by Unicode --
    in fact the Roman (note, *not* Romulan! ;-) ) orthography for
    Klingon was designed by Marc Okrand to work in ASCII characters
    or with a basic English typewriter.

    > but Tengwar is
    > apparently used significantly by a quite large and active community of users
    > in various countries, notably to write French or English ...

    etc., etc.

    And unlike Klingon, Tengwar *is* a well-defined script ... which
    accounts in large part for why so many people are actually
    using it.

    The UTC has seen encoding proposals for Tengwar, and the script
    is in the Roadmap. In my opinion there isn't much blocking
    it from being encoded eventually, except for modeling concerns
    about the modes of use of Tengwar, and because resolving those
    issues for Tengwar have been lower priority than working on
    a number of minority and historic scripts for Unicode 5.0.

    Note also that Unicode's lack of support for the Tengwar
    *script* is not an indication that it lacks support for
    the French, English, or Elvish *languages* -- any of which
    can be and are in fact widely written using the Latin script. ;-)

    --Ken



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