Re: The politics of Unicode

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Oct 02 1999 - 13:53:59 EDT


Ar 18:28 -0700 1999-09-29, scríobh Kenneth Whistler:

>I'm willing to state that the vast proportion of everything in Latin
>that needs to be represented is already representable.
>
>There are known specific holes. Michael Everson and the Finnish and
>Swedish NB's are working on an explicit Finno-Ugric Phonetic Alphabet
>proposal; we are aware that FUPA is not yet fully covered. But that is
>the kind of place you have to go to find holes in the Latin coverage --
>not national or minority language orthographies.

Other minor things like early 20th-century Cyrillic letters are under
investigation. A superscript Latin u is missing, used both by FUPA and a
Canadian aboriginal language. Things like the Latin variant "Initial
Teaching Alphabet" might be considered. FUPA adds some more diacritics
which will extend the ability of presently-encoded Latin greatly. Scholarly
letters used in Egyptian transliteration are missing (see my paper on
Apostrophe). I'm of a mind to consider a few more "non-IPA" phonetic
characters where they are fairly widely used.

But Ken is right. Latin is very thoroughly covered, and all of the examples
given here are mor or less marginal.

(Actually it's Ireland, Finland, and Norway that are working on FUPA.)

--
Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement)
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn;  Baile an Bhóthair;  Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



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