> >>There are plenty of characters which exist in the literature that are not > >>ended in Unicode, and in fact are specifically excluded: those of written > >>but dead languages. > > > >
Michael Everson responded: > >They are not only not excluded, they are included: Runic and Deseret > >are just the beginning. There are many pending proposals for things > >like hieroglyphs and cuneiform. > And Barry asked: > > Now that there are kluges that allow for extra room. But wasn't it not > always the case historically speaking that these languages were, shall we > say, less than welcome? A. We're not talking about "languages" here, but scripts and writing systems. There are dead languages that are written with living scripts, and dead scripts that were once used to write what are still living languages. And, of course, there are languages, living or dead, that never had a writing system (except possibly for technical transcriptions). Unicode is aimed at coverage of the characters for the *scripts*. B. The charter of Unicode has *always* included historic scripts. They were simply of lower priority than the major current world and national scripts for obvious reasons. See the following quote from The Unicode Standard, Version 1.0, Volume 1, p. 4 (1991): "Less common and archaic scripts will be added to future versions of the Unicode Standard. Scripts of this type were not included in the initial release because of the difficulty of evaluating their content. For many of these scripts, extensive research will be necessary to produce an agreed-upon encoding." Note, nothing there about "we don't want them in because they won't fit in our 16-bit world", but rather a sober assessment about the amount of work and time it would take to do justice to something like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform before it would be ready for a standard character encoding. --Ken
