Re: ?MP = Multi*lingual* plane?
Twice as lovely when an immediately comprehensible term is used consistently (for example, our old faithful multilingual), be that term precise or no, rather than coin new terms without due reason, which could take years to become current amongst end users and yet more years to understand. mg Scríobh 27/02/2014 15:30, Asmus Freytag: On 2/27/2014 2:32 AM, Shriramana Sharma wrote: Given that Unicode encodes scripts and not languages, how appropriate is it to call the BMP and the SMP as the multi*lingual* planes? Isn't it lovely how these things work? A./ ___ Unicode mailing list Unicode@unicode.org http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie * ___ Unicode mailing list Unicode@unicode.org http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
Re: Language Death
Languages don't die, Mark. What happens is that a large linguistic community gobbles up (cannibalizes) a smaller linguistic community. Nothing to do with the nature of the language, in either case. Unicode can do a lot to slow down this process, by facilitating the registration of characters needed by the latter, to match the full complement already available to the former, thereby accordiing both languages equal access to electronic resources. Even such small linguistic communities as are very strong on the ground (in the real, non-virtual world), need e-support for the future. mg Scríobh 05/12/2013 16:25, Mark Davis ☕: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0077056 with a popular article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/04/how-the-internet-is-killing-the-worlds-languages/ The source article was interesting, although I'd take issue with some of their methodology. The WP gloss takes some liberties; in particular, the source says The latest (2012/02/28) publicly available version of the [SIL] database distinguishes 7,776 languages while the WP leaps to the conclusion that …at least 7,776 languages are in use in the greater offline world. Mark https://google.com/+MarkDavis / / /— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —/ // -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. *mg...@egt.ie *eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Mail list changes for 2014
On all the lists I run, this is an option the subscriber can personally control (I agree that it is the best default). mg Scríobh 04/12/2013 00:22, Rick McGowan: Hello Bjoern-- Thanks for the note on this. I'll be sure to double check during setup. Normally our current lists are configured so that users do receive copies of messages they send. Rick -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Mayan numerals (again)
As 2013 draws to its close, perhaps time to ask again what progress has been made this year in re registering Mayan numerals. Reminded to ask by the msg below, which may influence Unicode, as relayed today to LCTL-T members by its administrators. Would be good to end the year on a note of success, in whatever degree, in re a proven need. mg -- Forwarded message -- From: Lisa Witmer lisa.wit...@outlook.com lct...@lists.umn.edu Date: Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 11:35 AM Subject: Seeking Language Test Developers To: l...@umn.edu l...@umn.edu To whom it may concern: Would you kindly forward the announcement below to anyone who may be interested? Thanks in advance, Lisa Witmer The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a target language (TL) expert with experience in document translation to prepare testing materials aimed at assessing translation skills going from the TLs listed below into English. The linguist will need to find texts in the TL that are authentic (i.e. originally written in the TL for a TL audience), and provide translations into English. The test consists of two forms, each composed of four short passages of increasing difficulty, according to the Interagency Language Roundtable Skill Level Descriptions for Translation Performance ( http://www.govtilr.org/skills/AdoptedILRTranslationGuidelines.htm). The texts should pertain to topics of concern to the FBI, such as law, criminology, forensic medicine, technology, and finance. Training will be provided. *Work will be part-time and temporary.* This job would be on a one-time contractual basis and payment for preparing two forms (in all, eight passages) is $2000. Although the contractor will need to come to our D.C. office to meet with us initially, the work can be done from home. Consequently, contractors in the D.C. metro area are preferred. However, if the contractor is not from the D.C. area, the Bureau will reimburse expenses for travel within the U.S. Any necessary training will be provided. *Required qualifications* (please respond only if you meet these qualifications): - Native speaker educated to the university level in one of the TLs below - U.S. citizen or green card holder - Able to come to D.C. or local FBI field office for fingerprinting and to fill out forms - Not bound by any federal non-compete agreements Scríobh 02/07/2013 12:03, Jameson Quinn: 2013/7/2, Szelp, A. Sz.a.sz.sz...@gmail.com: The question is, whether the two versions (horizontal and vertical) are warranted for or not. With my limited knowledge of the matter, I would believe only one set to be encodable, the other being free / stylistic variation. I have examples of printed pages using both forms on the same page non-interchangably, if that helps. -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Mayan numerals (again)
I also remember your proposal, Jameson, which I believe to be worthwhile and urgently needed by the community of users you described at that time (whether the full discussion following on your sending your proposal to 'Unicode List' unicode@unicode.org has been preserved for reference in the archives of this list, I can not say for certain, though I would hope and expect that it has). As to procedures, all I can add of help to the last line of Fréderic's msg (below) of today, is that my best guess (from long observation of transactions on this and related lists spanning a couple of decades)— my best guess is that the only sure way is to succeed with any proposal put to Unicode is to the right insiders on your side, that is, people to whom Unicode pays attention, because the substance of your proposal, however valid and whatever its practical merit for your user community, is most unlikely to gain success unless you can recruit the personal support of private individuals/companies with influence in/over Unicode, which you may be able to work out for yourself by observing such e-mails as surface publicly here. I wish you every success, because I believe you deserve that. mg Scríobh 24/06/2013 09:26, Frédéric Grosshans: Le 23 juin 2013 21:37, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com a écrit : Last year, I started a discussion about proposing the Mayan numerals for inclusion in Unicode. Several people on the list supported this idea, and encouraged me to submit a proposal. I did not manage to do so last year, but I am ready to now. I have access to dozens of different books with their page numbers, tables of contents, and publication dates in mayan numerals. Several of them use the numerals in other ways, such as numbered lists or century numbers (ie, siglo 16, 16th century, with 16 in Mayan numbers). All of these are from a single publishing house, and I know of 2 other publishers who use similar practices. None of the samples I have are textbooks, and it is common for math textbooks here in Guatemala to have a section on Mayan numerals, typically with a few simple addition problems or the like. The more diverse your examples are, the better. By the way, I recall the post I wrote last year with examples of those numerals in non-Mayan precolumbian context : http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2012-m09/0071.html I really think these examples strengthen the case for encoding these numerals before and separately from the Mayan glyphs. The encoding of the Mayan writing system will be a complex endeavour, and the encoding model clearly cannot be chosen now. This means that the numerals you propose may or may not be used a few years (decades ?) down the line, for the encoding of Mayan. If they are naturally useful for other scripts, it's not an unsolvable problem. If they are only for Mayan writing, it is a show stopper. That's also why I think that Mesoamerican bar and dots numerals are a better name than Mayan numerals. The publisher of the books I have is interested, and would probably sign on to my proposal, though it would take about a month for them to get full consensus on this. A month is quite short compared to the typical encoding delay (a few years). And you can submit their support letter separately from your proposal. I can also provide photos of Guatemalan currency notes, which have mayan as well as arabic numerals on them. I'd like to propose 40 glyphs: the vertical and horizontal versions of the digits 0-19. The zero glyph would be in it's shell form; the several minor variants of this form would be considered as the same base glyph. Ok This initial proposal would not include head variants or the petroglyphic flower zero, nor would it include petroglyphic marginal decorations on the glyphs for 1, 6, 11, and 16, as all of those are generally used in a context of fully glyphic writing, which has a number of difficult technical issues to resolve before it's ready for unicode. (Although I could provide at least one modern example of a glyphic text; this is at least to some degree a living art today, though it was dead for centuries.) To me these examples are part of the real Mayan writing system and will have to wait at least until the encoding model of Mayan is decided (ie a long time) I'd like to know what should be my next step, and if anyone who's more experienced with unicode procedures would like to advise me more closely. I'd be interested to wprk with you on this proposal, but you should know that, contrarily to man6 readers of this list, I have no experience in Unicode procedures beyond what I could guess by reading archived proposals available on Internet. Frédéric Grosshans -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Mayan numerals
Scríobh 27/09/2012 22:36, Richard Wordingham richard.wording...@ntlworld.com: ... On the basis of the discussion here, I expect the Mayan digits will soon be encoded... I believe that. though your tirade hinders rather than helps. I do not believe that. The Irish vote may well decide the matter, I would like to believe that. though a Unicode Technical Committee rejection would probably sway several national bodies. Q.E.D. mg Richard. -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: VS: Mayan numerals
Only national bodies with a vote on ISO/IEC 10646 can decide for or against Mr Quinn's formal proposal. I mentioned a scarf decorated with place-names I understood to be a gift symbolic of inter-country cooperation in CEN and ISO. Unicode is not a country. I wish that the large companies which set it up, some of which exercise more power than many of the countries eligible to vote on such matters had no operatives bent on influencing national votes, but would take a step back and allow simple inter-country cooperation to operate without such pressure, as CEN and ISO were set up to do, to the benefit of all, whereby even such companies as have no faith in the wisdom of native communities to know what is best for their world today would benefit. mg -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: VS: Mayan numerals
Who knows, Jameson, but that some Unicoders may actually believe that delaying the encoding of Mayan means delaying the end of their world. :-) Scríobh 21/09/2012 20:35, Erkki I Kolehmainen: I fail to understand your strong attack on Unicode. Sincerely, Erkki One-line msgs such as the above (which Erkki cc:ed inappropriately to Irish groups outside his control) can no longer scare ordinary people into silence. On a personal note, I do understand that this is the worst-ever week in history for Finland-Ireland relations, but did not expect that negative political attitude to be reflected in that one-line unanticipated negative shot (above) sent in reply to an honest opinion, which makes me feel like discarding a summer headscarf I like(d), which I understood, the number of years ago I can not recall just now, to be a gift from Erkki (was I wrong about that!), with much-loved place-names on it. On a professional note, I repeat that NSAI (Ireland) will vote YES on this specific proposal, if given the chance to do so, despite negative pressure to the contrary from Unicode members, as broadcast by them on the unicode@unicode.org. Ireland is not taking any more blame for problems arising solely within Unicode, such as its continuing objection to encoding Mayan numerals. Please see portion of msg from Frédéric Grosshans quoted below, which supports Mr Quinn's case. Like Mr Grosshams, I do not pretend to fully understand Unicode's apparently abstruse decision-making process, only to know that other character sets I'd have thought less important have certainly been passed by Unicode members on the nod, as it were (i.e. without as much evidence as we have for Mayan numerals). This simple request to encode Mayan numerals has been delayed on so long as to look like a blockade, 14 full years have gone past since this issue was first considered by Unicode members, who summarily dismissed it without due process. Now that it is being re-considered by Unicode members, one can only hope that this time it is accorded due process with no more delay. That is, judged fairly on foot of Mr Quinn's detailed submission, as indicated. Proposals with far less merit and far less urgency than his have been proposed by Unicode agents and passed into sectoral standards with more haste and less skill. Ensuring an untrammelled vote in SC 2 on the specific merits of this specific proposal is the only thing of importance now. Scríobh 24/09/2012 19:16, Jameson Quinn: (Resend; last time bounced due to photo attachment) So, I see that this thread is heating up again, and a progress report is in order. * I still intend to present a proposal in the time frame I gave before: within this b'ak'tun (5000 year period... that is, by the end of the year). I have been looking for examples of use... Good. The more evidence the better, only don't be sidetracked into replying to delay-causing requests for more and yet more evidence when what I have already seen ought to be enough (your description of the user groups already feeling the pinch due to non-recognition by Unicode of their characters makes their case). As to the debate about whether these are worth encoding now, I certainly believe that the answer is yes. As others have said, whether or not you think it's probable that these modern characters will end up being usable in encoding ancient text, their usefulness now is in no doubt. No doubt at all. I believe you. You have my permission to use my name by way of reference to help convince others in standards circles with whom I have been working successfully for over twenty years, although that name mightn't do you much good in the other, smaller circles sometimes allowed to dominate this and related lists. :-) Anyway, you certainly seem to have already recruited good local and reputable academic support, which should be all that's needed, given a level playing field and no favours. Sincerely, mg Jameson Scríobh 26/09/2012 13:44, Frédéric Grosshans: Le 24/09/2012 20:16, Jameson Quinn a écrit : ... Good pictures of the bills (including the Q50 one ) can be found her http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_quetzal#Banknotes . By the way, I recently saw a post from an associate professor of matematics looking at ancient number systems in (Xe)TeX. He says I’d love to be able to do something similar with the Mayan numbers. I tried for a while, but couldn’t get them to work. The reason of his failure is the lack of unicode encoding. http://divisbyzero.com/2012/08/30/ancient-number-systems-in-xetex/ Do people think I should include any of this investigation of ancient usage in my proposal? As you've probably guessed by now, I think you should... but I have no experience at all in the encoding process! ... -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg
Re: Mayan numerals
So will Ireland vote YES on this vital vote (subject to its being put to a democratic and transparent national vote within our national (MSAI) mirror committee of ISO, same as I'd imagine must apply in the case of Finland's OSI mirror committee, as set out in Erkki's msg below). Cc:ing all members of e-groups nsai-isotc3...@listserv.heanet.ie and tc4...@listserv.heanet.ie, serving relevant NSAI mirror/interest groups, as well as officials employed in NSAI central offices. Unfortunately, voting transparency is not guaranteed, given the influence of the Unicode Consortium and its appointed agents in various countries, including my own, although I cannot see how Unicode could gain anything (but rather, on the contrary, only stand to lose some of its remaining support) by continuing to oppose this infinitessimal, modest and reasonable request for characters whose recognition has been delayed now for 10 years and more, according to the archives of list unicode@unicode.org. It is Ireland's national policy in ISO (through NSAI) to vote YES to all reasonable requests for standardization facilities for community operational reasons, especially those originating within or on behalf of native user groups (as has been patently proven in the case of the proposed set of Mayan numerals). If only it were left to national bodies, without any external commercial/political/other input, I believe that Mr Jameson Quinn's straighforwardf, modest and reasonable and absolutely uncontroversial request would be granted instanter, if Unicode reps would only withdraw their opposion, which, in my own personal opinion, after long consideration of stalling msgs seen to date, whose contents appear to be groundless from any ISO perspective I know. Le dea-mhéin, mg Scríobh 21/09/2012 09:56, Erkki I Kolehmainen: FYI: Finland has decided to support the encoding of Mayan numerals if the question comes up in SC2. Sincerely, Erkki -Alkuperäinen viesti- Lähettäjä: unicode-bou...@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bou...@unicode.org] Puolesta Erkki I Kolehmainen Lähetetty: 24. elokuuta 2012 9:53 Kopio: 'Jameson Quinn'; 'Rick McGowan'; 'unicode' Aihe: RE: Mayan numerals ... Finland has not decided its position, but I'd personally tend to support Asmus' position. Sincerely, Erkki -Alkuperäinen viesti- Lähetetty: 24. elokuuta 2012 1:28 Vastaanottaja: Asmus Freytag Kopio: Jameson Quinn; Rick McGowan; unicode Aihe: Re: Mayan numerals On 23 Aug 2012, at 22:40, Asmus Freytag wrote: I think Jameson makes a case that there is a part of Mayan that doesn't fit the standard model of an ancient script that is being encoded (merely) to further the work of specialists working on it. The use he claims that the digits receive in elementary school education makes these separate from the rest of the script. While they may be related to the ancient numbers, their current use is essentially modern and living. They're already using it without Unicode, so why not let them keep doing what they are doing until we are ready to do a proper job. Given that usage, Jameson is correct in that using a PUA encoding (CSUR or otherwise) is a non-starter as is being put off for 5, 10, or 20 years until the full script is deciphered. Tengwar has been in the CSUR since 1993 and people have been using it without The Mayan script, Asmus, HAS been deciphered. It is not ready for encoding. Those are two different things. The correct solution here would be a proposal for encoding what amounts to a modern representation of Mayan digits, which then would have no tie in with the encoding of the ancient script itself. So we end up with two different encodings for Mayan numbers? I'm not tempted. Having a duplicate encoding for modern and ancient Mayan digits isn't problematical on any level. Apart from the needless duplication. The code space needed is minitesimal Irrelevant. and, as Mayan as a full script does not see living use, and as the digits even where used in modern context are not the primary number system, the practical issues of any duplication are non-existent. Apart from the duplication. Mayan scholars and encoding experts may later decide that a duplication isn't necessary and re-use these modern representations as part of the encoding for the ancient system. But that's neither here nor there as far as the use case presented by Jameson is concerned. -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Mayan numerals
You are most welcome, Jameson. I look forward with interest to monitoring progress re this. All the best, mg Scríobh 24/08/2012 13:49, Jameson Quinn: Thank you, Marion. To strengthen his hand, Mr Quinn might be well advised to ask his own National Body for accreditation as an ISO representative for himself and some friends, so as to participate directly, as an interest group, through normal ISO channels (I recommend this because decisions taken in re ISO 10646 by a majority vote of participating countries must become part of Unicode). If his country does not already have National Body participation in ISO, this is not such a great difficulty, as that should be easy to arrange, especially with its own national interest at stake. Actually, as a US citizen who's spent the last 10 years residing in the Mayan area (Chiapas and Guatemala), I doubt I'd be an appropriate choice as a Guatemalan representative. But I have already written to Lolmay Garcia, the Kaqchikel linguistic community representative on the ALMG, who, as a technically-inclined Mayan linguist, would be an appropriate choice. I also have contacts in the Ministry of Culture, a couple of Mayan-oriented publishing houses (Chol Samaj and Prodessa), and the local free software movement. (In Chiapas, my contacts are more with the Zapatistas, who might be interested in these issues but will not be getting ISO representation any day soon. I have no contacts with the Mayan communities in the Yucatan peninsula, Belize, or Honduras.) I hope this helps, Yes, greatly. Jameson -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Mayan numerals
The combined argument of both ancient and current use together is the strongest, most comnpelling of arguements in favour of encloding Mayan characters (whether as a full or partial collection shouldn't really matter, the only thing that matters is to serve the current and urgent need of users, once proven, as I believe it has been this week). As an Irishwoman, I remember the time-wasting obstacles placed in our path when we were building up the support needed to support our ancient script (still in use today) encoded. In that work of national interest, we were supported by other countries and by independent experts with nothing to gain for themselves. Therefore, as one of Ireland's representatives in ISO (where the ISO 10646 International Standard corresponds to the Unicode standard), I'd like to assure Mr. Quinn that my country's national body (NSAI) will look favourably on his proposal — that is, if Ireland's representatives get a chance to debate it as a group and then take a vote on it without outside pressure! Unfortunately, it is possible that acceptance or rejection of any such proposal couldl be decided by perhaps only one or two people then pushed through certain vulnerable National Bodies, such as ours, as a decision required by Unicode (rather than by consensus amongst independent national members of national bodies). I am copying this msg to some other Irish representatives because so many votes on such proposals are bypassing the general rule of national and then international consensus, presumably on the grounds that Unicode is not obliged to conform to ISO protocols. Usually, people like us don't complain about being bypased by Unicode agents, but I would hate to see Mr. Quinn defeated by default, if there is anything we can do to help (as ordinary NSAI members not in any way obligated or affiliated to the Unicode Consortium, but supportive of its more useful decsions). To strengthen his hand, Mr Quinn might be well advised to ask his own National Body for accreditation as an ISO representative for himself and some friends, so as to participate directly, as an interest group, through normal ISO channels (I recommend this because decisions taken in re ISO 10646 by a majority vote of participating countries must become part of Unicode). If his country does not already have National Body participation in ISO, this is not such a great difficulty, as that should be easy to arrange, especially with its own national interest at stake. I hope this helps, mg Scríobh 22/08/2012 20:00, Asmus Freytag: On 22 Aug 2012, at 18:05, Jameson Quinn wrote: I understand that from a professional Mayanist perspective, having glyphs for just the numbers without even the dates or any of the rest isn't attractive. And I also understand that in real petroglyphs, 1 and 2 (for instance) usually look more like ∪•∪ and •∪• than like the simplified • and •• that I'd suggest for the basic glyphs. But I can say confidently that there are audiences who would use these glyphs, certainly more than a lot of what's in Unicode. This is beginning to look like there might be a case for a set of characters for Mayan digits in modern use, and to just separate them from the script. Also in light of what we learned about their use in education. That's not scholarly use, which is the usual bench mark for how to encode ancient scripts. A./ -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Too narrowly defined: DIVISION SIGN COLON
On 11/07/2012 18:30, Jukka K. Korpela wrote: ... For example, in formula mode, when you type “x”, Word by default changes it to mathematical italic x. It does *not* used a normal “x” of the font it uses in formulas (Cambria Math)—that font lacks italic, and if you “italicize” it, you get fake italic, algorithmically slanted normal letter, which is very different from mathematical italic letters of the font. That is amusing. I spent a lot of time trying to find math symbol x when preparing a document in MSWord for publication, before discovering I didn't have to search for that at all! :-) mg It’s interesting to see such usage—it’s probably the most common use of non-BMP characters that people encounter, even thought we are usually ignorant of what’s really happening here, and it *looks* like play with fonts only. Yucca -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign
Note also that handwritten letters and signs often have uppercase F written in reverse (but never its lowercase match f), which can cause problems for OCR processing, yet does not seem to be covered by any standard for handling such variation of presentation in the real world. mg Scríobh 23/05/2012 13:40, Philippe Verdy: ... Note also that those real-world handwritten Lira symbols would also look extremely similar to the handwritten symbols for the Euro, with the same basic features : a single long curve open on the right side, and two strokes. I know many that already write euros like a mirrored J, just to leave enough space for the strokes. The curve of the C does not leave enough place in the right side to avoid that the two strokes touch it. I may give photos of that (for example in handwritten promotional price lists facing restaurants and bars, or price indicators in fresh food markets) : you recognize the euro, but you hardly find the shape of a C as it is clearly truncated of its upper arm. -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland. * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Is there a term for strictly-just-this-encoding-and-not-really-that-encoding?
Scríobh 11/11/2010 18:38, Frank da Cruz: ... Most people are not even old enough to know what I'm talking about; they came of age in a Microsoft world. Make that born into, rather than came of age in many instances, Frank. After an informative and enjoyable seminar on the virtual library in UCD today, I found myself describing with some enthusiasm living with VT100s and the DEC-20 and exchanging text msgs with a friend who was dodging scud missiles during the first Gulf War to an audience of one in the form of a brilliant student who listened politely but without comprehension (before it occurred to me I might be boring her and so made my escape from a gathering from which I learned more than I had brought to it today). ... In any case, DEC's influence is still felt to this day in that its terminal types (VT100, 220, 320...) are widely emulated on PCs and widely supported by hosts (e.g. in Unix termcaps/terminfos). To the extent that the emulation is true, Windows code pages will break it every time. Although that is hard to believe, since you have always spoken only the truth in full measure of helpfulness down all the years, I do believe you! Ádh mór ort (Good luck), mg - Frank -- Marion Gunn * eGteo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, An Charraig Dhubh, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire/Ireland * mg...@egt.ie * eam...@egt.ie *
Re: Unibook 4.0.1 available
I understand. Should have put my question less bluntly? I belong to a group some of whose members seem to be able to make just about anything run on anything, no thanks to me, so I assumed the same expertise to be available within Unicode, only to have some volunteer(s) from within the ranks of UC offer to do that service for Asmus, if appropriate. Sorry if that was a wrong assumption, or an untimely suggestion, and my thanks to all who responded to my msg helpfully. mg Scríobh Kenneth Whistler: Philippe waxed lyrical about the advantages of platform-independent development: Isn't Java hiding most of these platform details, by providing unified support for platform-specific look and feel? Aren't there now many PLAF and themes manager available with automatic default selection of the look and feel of each platform? Aren't there enough system properties in these development tools so that the application can simply consult these properties to autoadapt to the platform differences? ... It's certainly not easy, and there are tons of options, but writing a system wrapper once avoids many customer support costs later when a customer is furious of having paid for a product that does not work on his host. etc. etc. Which all completely misses the point that Unibook 4.0.1 is written by *one* person, who is not a Java developer, who works specifically on the Windows platform, who wrote the application making tons of specific Windows calls, and targetted it at the Windows platform. However much you might want all software to be platform independent, and run equally well on Windows*, Mac OS, Un*x, and anything else you might care to indulge in, that isn't going to make *Asmus* write a system wrapper for Unibook 4.0.1 or rewrite the program to port it to a PLAF and themes manager. Anyone who wants Unibook for Mac or Unibook for Unix is free to take the concept and go off and write it in your spare time. And if you architect it with a platform-independent system wrapper, so much the better. And since Unibook is available free of charge for downloading I don't think that customers will be too furious for having paid for a product that does not work on their host. --Ken -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Unibook 4.0.1 available
Scríobh Asmus Freytag: I'm glad you like it. I've been told previously by experienced Mac users that it runs fine with Virtual PC on the Mac. Nothing runs fine with Virtual PC on the Mac, except things which run fine with Virtual PC on the Mac (meaning it's too memory greedy to run normal, essential Mac thingies at the same time). Is it really so hard to make multi-platform, open-office-type utilities? mg A./ PS: To those of you who downloaded 4.0.1 already, the zip archive was missing the install.bat file. That's been fixed. -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Unibook 4.0.1 available
Lovely browser. Is it possible to obtain a Mac-friendly version? mg Scríobh Asmus Freytag: I've updated Unibook to version 4.0.1 The latest version reads more property files and can display some of the new 4.0.1 properties. There are new ways to combine properties. As before, you can cutpaste either the character code or the character name of a selected character to the clipboard. Also, as before, you can follow cross references by clicking on them. http://www.unicode.org/unibook/ A./ PS: For my fellow 10646 editors, note that this is the version of the program used to prepare FPDAM1 and PDAM2. -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Glyph variants vs. glyphic variants
The expression 'glyph variants' would be more common, I believe. mg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello All, What is the preferred terminology in the Unicode context: glyph variants or glyphic variants? Both exist in real-life documents. Thanks in advance for any views on this! Best regards, Marc Küster -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: What is the principle?
Yes. I can verify that (the Irish word for it is 'cuairín', which can only mean something softly curved). mg Scríobh Séamas Ó Brógáin: John Cowan wrote: That reminds me. The name of the circumflex accent is obviously derived from Greek, but its form is not. Is it in fact the degenerate descendant of the letter s, does anybody know? No. When accent marks (probably in fact tone marks) were first applied (retrospectively) to Classical Greek the circumflex accent was curved---exactly like an upside-down breve, in fact. Hence the name, or so I have always assumed. You can see this form in some older fonts. It has also been made identical to the tilde, but I'm pretty certain the upside-down-breve is the original form. Séamas Ó Brógáin -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: What's the BMP being saved for?
Ar 15:33 + 2004/03/18, scríobh Arcane Jill: This probably is going to sound like a really dumb question, but ... Is the BMP being saved for something? ... Arcane Jill There are never any dumb questions, Jill, only dumb answers. BMP is part of 10646-speak, and probably part of pre-Unicode terminology. To summarize (telescoping time) so as to get this msg off before returning to paid work.:-) The decision to create the BMP dates back to a time when certain software suppliers were complaining that anthing approaching a full implementation of ISO 10646 (later transmuted, so to speak, into Unicode) would be too big for them to handle, and too costly. Small local groups, such as ours, were then working rapidly and painlessly mostly on national and international character sets on far smaller scales. I recall chairing some discussion at a CEN workshop, possibly in Slovenia, in re something related, at the height of the debate. In any case, by that time, CEN had already emerged as a big player in this work (I think Unicode had yet to make much of a mark, but I don't mind if someone corrects me about that, if wrong, because it really doesn't matter now, in the least). Anyway, it was agreed to divide ISO 10646 into sections, such as BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) and the MES (Minimum European Subset), and my own company, among others, was very pleased to be hired by CEN to do the necessary (a truly exciting and rewarding period, when we actually got _paid_, generously, if belatedly, for such Standards work!) Is the BMP a reality, actually referenced in software, or scheduled to be so referenced in future? I doubt it, although I think that would be a very good thing (just as I believe the 8859 series and the like more practially useful, even today, as clean-cutting tools, than the full complement of 10646, which remains a rather blunt instrument which creates obstacles in unflagged text). Justification for saving the BMP for the purposes originally intended is probably something the Unicode Consortium would be happy to clarify for you. Perhaps that has already been done in some of today's e-mails, which are too numerous for me to read right now, under pressure of urgent work. (I do promise to try to read them all.) If you want more info on the purpose and genesis of the BMP, I suggest that you ask NSAI to let you study the archives of NSAI/AGITS/WG6 (later transmuted into NSAI/ICTSCC/SC4), or thou send a simple query directly to CEN (on whose live agenda such matters remain, I believe). Hope this helps, mg ps. Would someone just hit reply to this msg, to time our comms here? There seems to be a long timelag between sending and delivery of Unicode list msgs, sometimes. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Irish dotless I
Ar 15:41 + 2004/03/18, scríobh [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Anyone who feels that past monetary contributions towards encoding efforts were made based on false pretenses may be able to seek legal redress... James Kass An admission of having made a seemingly foolhardy investment hardly amounts to making such a claim as you say, James.:-) Scríobh Doug: I sincerely hope that if you have the experience and expertise in Unicode that you claim, you can come away with somewhat better understanding of the principles of Unicode than you are demonstrating here. Nu-huh. I claim only to have had such understanding and enthusiasm as inspired me to work very hard, for many years, to finance something of a curate's egg. Would you ask all Unicode backers to first demonstrate an understanding of its principles equal to yours before letting them foot the price of your travel costs?:-) Unicode is NOT a glyph registry... As far as 'Irish long s' was concerned, it was, surely.:-) Scríobh [EMAIL PROTECTED] People do not create machine-readible texts in the old orthography because of the technical challenges of reproducing them. I've met many native speakers of Irish here in Chicago who want little to do with the written language because, as they say, it's not their language. If there were text processing resources available for the Gaelic script, this could change. I have to agree with the above paragraph of Brian's. More from Brian: Therefore, it's not a question of what font the document creator chooses; it's a matter of what system is chosen. I would slightly modify Marion's question to this: In the context of a document using traditional Irish orthography (which does not contain i), how can dotless i be preserved in plain text? Modification accepted, with thanks. Scríobh Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED]: May I pick a nit here? Dotless i is used in the official orthography of at least one non-Turkic language, that of Udi, a north-east Caucasian minority language of Azerbaijan; I think it is also in the Latin script orthography of Lezgi, the language of a much larger minority group. That is good news, if it equates to good news for Irish. Do you think it does, Peter? Too many more msgs to wade through, which ain't necessarily true.:-) Scríobh Carl W. Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ... I think that I like Peter Constable's suggestion: Keep in mind that OpenType allows fonts to have language-specific behaviours. You could create a font in which the glyph for 0069 is dotless for Gaelic, and dotted otherwise. This way you can use the COMBINING DOT ABOVE if you want a dot above the i for Irish text. Carl Thanks. Didn't know that (scanning my incoming mail for 'Irish' didn't turn up PC's reference to 'Gaelic'). I am not familiar with OpenType. Any OpenType-savvy fontmaker like to discuss this offline, with a view to developing fonts derived from authentic native Irish models? EGTeo might be willing to fund some such (and I have a background in calligraphy, which could help). Thanks for recounting your keyboardmaking experiences, Carl (which must have been painful, even to recount). It is a comfort to see an intelligent person publicly admitting to 'thousands of dollars down the drain' on an investment which failed to pay. And yet more of a comfort to see such as you and I can afterwards not only survive, but thrive! Best, mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Irish undotted i
Scríobh [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Peter Constable [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If it's really necessary to facilitate that, Marion (or whoever) should propose a variation-selector sequence. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before, but there's actually a very logical argument to support this necessity. In Irish writing that uses the dot-convention, the dot represents lenition. Vowel phonemes are not liable to lenition, so it doesn't make any sense to have a dotted i, any more than a dotted a, e, o, or u. Exactly my point. I believe I had a similar conversation in February 14 yrs ago, with a newly-arrived American lad (when I was still on my first Mac and a VM100) who traded me, for a copy of Ó Dónaill's dictionary (and I considered cheap at the price), a poor, raggedy attempt at an Irish font my Department refused to purchase, but which fired my hungry soul's imagination. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Irish dotless I
Yes! That is why Irish traditional spelling rendered in Gentium looks so silly! I'm sure I, or almost anyone else on this august list, could easily adapt Gentium to the small extent of removing that extraneous dot, but it would probably be illegal to so alter it. Any point asking SIL for that favour? That is, asking SIL for a special 'Irish' edition of Gentium with only our native dots, for when our native fonts are denied us, for whatever reason. mg Scríobh [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I don't think it affects Irish, unless you want to be dotless Marıon ın Irısh even when usıng a non-Gaelıc font. The consensus on the list seems to be that Irish should be written with a normal i character and the dot removed in particular fonts. That's exactly the point. When the dot-convention for lenition is being used, the i should never be dotted, even when using a non-Gaelic font, because there's no such thing as a lenited i in Irish. It's not a character-glyph issue. -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Irish dotless I
Lest I get jumped upon for inaccuracy!:-) I hasten to add that, if we can get an undotted i in fine Gentium I don't care if it als provides dots for every single consonant (we may be laughed at as ignorant peasants, but we know enough to only use what we need in accordance with the practice of our ancients). mg Yes! That is why Irish traditional spelling rendered in Gentium looks so silly! I'm sure I, or almost anyone else on this august list, could easily adapt Gentium to the small extent of removing that extraneous dot, but it would probably be illegal to so alter it. Any point asking SIL for that favour? That is, asking SIL for a special 'Irish' edition of Gentium with only our native dots, for when our native fonts are denied us, for whatever reason. mg Scríobh [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Quoting Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I don't think it affects Irish, unless you want to be dotless Marıon ın Irısh even when usıng a non-Gaelıc font. The consensus on the list seems to be that Irish should be written with a normal i character and the dot removed in particular fonts. That's exactly the point. When the dot-convention for lenition is being used, the i should never be dotted, even when using a non-Gaelic font, because there's no such thing as a lenited i in Irish. It's not a character-glyph issue. -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Irish dotless I (was: Languages with letters that always takediacriticals
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Ar 03:17 -0800 2004/03/18, scríobh Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED]: An alternative for Marion, if her company still has rights to the fonts which it so expensively developed to serve her country, would be to distribute those fonts widely (and that probably means free of charge) in Ireland and among others who might want a Celtic type script, and to promote them heavily among those interested in authentic Irish script. Giving away good fonts is more likely to work than boycotting bad ones. I agree. The only difficulty, Peter, is that, whereas the earliest versions of the better fonts bear my company's copyright notice, that notice is missing from versions of those same fonts produced in latter years. If you can persuade the company whose copyright notice they currently bear to agree to your proposal, as set out above, mine will not object to that. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Irish dotless I (was: Languages with letters that always take diacriticals
Chuig: Unicode Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scríobh Carl W. Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Marion, What exactly are you proposing? A glyph change so that the glyphs for normal dotted I be rendered without the dot, or that Irish be added to the list of languages that uses the dotless I such as Turkish, Azeri, and most likely the Latin alphabets for Tatar and Bashkir. If it is a glyph issue that it is not part of the scope Unicode. If it should really use the dotless Is then Unicode needs to be changed. Carl I don't know, Carl. I do know my language is being badly served, however. Some Unicode oldtimers may recall the 'Irish long s' debate (before your time, Jon), when, finally persuaded that only 10646/Unicode could guarantee its continuance, I threw all of my company's resources into campaigning for that. That particular campaign was such a resounding 'success' we went on to spend thousands of quid each year, for many years, trekking one more encoding campaign trail after another, in support of many other languages, as well as our own. Guess what? We were wrong about 'long s'. Dead wrong. We didn't need that encoded in Unicode/10646 for the sake of the Irish at all. The possibility of using (Turkish) dotless i to ensure the current objective was first mooted a time when we were bogged down in the extremely expensive business of subsidizing the development of computerized fonts derived from native Irish models. To recap: dot above is a traditional diacritic in Irish, reserved for use with certain consonants (its function being served, in Roman script, by placing the 'letter' h after those same consonants). I suppose (with thanks to Antoine for reading my msg so carefully) I should add that dotting an i, even in Romanized text, was unusual in Irish handwriting until recently, presumably influenced by its prevalence in type. So, my question still is (having scanned dozens of Unicode responses to my msg this wk) our perennial, modest request of how to guarantee continuance, in the specific context of Irish text computing, of the traditional restriction of the Irish diacritic dot (having only one single function in Irish) to the consonants to which it belongs? Having worked so hard (sweating long years at other sources of income) to fund the price of developing fonts and attending mtgs to define not just individual 10646/Unicode characters, but whole character blocks within 10646/Unicode, plus a series of 8859 sets to serve my country and her near neighbours, as well as at drafting some relevant IS (Irish Standards), it seems crazy that all that work is being thrown away (because such defined character sets, it seems, are no longer being used, dropped from referencing 'Unicode-savvy' software). Strikes me now as possibly disadvantageous to promote 'Unicode-savvy' software incapable of discriminating according to context. Offering such thoughts, for what they are worth, as a fine night follows a gloriously sunny Patrick's Day in Ireland. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: OT? Languages with letters that always take diacriticals
Scríobh Radovan Garabik [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Almost all languages using latin script. They use i with dot above, but not ı without. Turkish is the (almost) only language that has both :-) ... Irish in Roman script is written i with dot above, Irish in traditional script is written i without dot above. The current flooding of our local advertising and publishing markets by various non-native uncial fonts to write our language goes against tradition in imposing on us that unwanted dot. Is there any way at all that using Unicode can help support our tradition? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Alpha and/or Numeric
Chuig: [EMAIL PROTECTED] What's with the proposed new part(s) of ISO 639 - are new codes likely to go alpha or numeric or combo? Anyone know? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Useful Breton links
Skol Diwan has for long been responsible for true Breton schools. If Eric or Philippe would care to e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] privately, I should be happy to help (in my experience, total ignorance of a language is less harmful to our language movements than partial knowledge, and ignorance is always curable). O sent va bro, ma divallet!:-) mg Scríobh Eric Muller [EMAIL PROTECTED] : And Skol Diwan. These are indeed schools that teach Breton and other subjects in Breton, but they are not public schools, in the sense of being run by the state. There are true public schools that teach in Breton... Eric. Philippe Verdy: I'd really like to know more about Breton, but the fact is that despite I am a native Breton and live there in Britanny... -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
[OT] Voiced velar fricative
Common enough in Irish, Doug. Herewith some minimal pairs: ghroí (voiced) chroí (unvoiced) ghas (voiced) chas (unvoiced) ghual (voiced) chual (unvoiced) ghoill (voiced) choill (unvoiced) ghnó (voiced) chnó (unvoiced) Learners (until they develop a good ear for the difference) can make mistakes to their cost in re the above and similar pairings. Hope this helps, mg -- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Announcement re NSAI/ISO/TC 46 IG
Please circulate this notice. Announcing the establishment of NSAI/ISO/TC 46/IG (the National Standards Authority of Ireland's ISO/TC 46 Interest Group). NSAI/ISO/TC 46/IG is now up and running as Ireland's National Forum on matters within the scope of ISO/TC 46 'Information and documentation'.***(URL) If you are interested in ISO/TC 46 issues, it would be appreciated if you would bring them to the notice of NSAI/ISO/TC 46/IG. New members welcome. Fáilte ar leith roimh chomhfhreagras as Gaeilge. Marion Gunn, Convener, NSAI/ISO/TC 46/IG -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * ***(URL) http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/tc/tclist/TechnicalCommitteeDetailPage.TechnicalCommitteeDetail?COMMID=1757)
Re: Handwritten EURO sign (off topic?)
Not pausing to wonder why on earth this list [EMAIL PROTECTED] is currently discussing my country's currencies, only to wonder if anyone here knows whether Ireland is the only EU country which has to use two - in Belfast we use Pounds Sterling (£), and in Dublin euro (). mg ps. To complicate/simplify matters further: I am recently returned from an academic conference in Scotland where I was invited to give a paper, and a few days ago just added £10 of my leftover UK currency from that trip to a handful of euro to buy something here. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: [OT] French Government Bans the Term 'E-Mail'
Scríobh Michael \(michka\) Kaplan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I always assumed the lowercase i was either meant to be something similar to devs but mean something like information to normal (i.e., non-developer) types. Then, like any concept is has to be [over]used everywhere. Maybe someone from Apple who has talked to their marketing folks lately could comment MichKa I read that 'i' (in the Apple context) as meaning 'i(nternet ready)'. It is possible I could be wrong about that. Am I? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: [OT] French Government Bans the Term 'E-Mail'
Scríobh Michael \(michka\) Kaplan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I always assumed the lowercase i was either meant to be something similar to devs but mean something like information to normal (i.e., non-developer) types. Then, like any concept is has to be [over]used everywhere. Maybe someone from Apple who has talked to their marketing folks lately could comment MichKa I read that 'i' (in the Apple context) as meaning 'i(nternet ready)'. It is possible I could be wrong about that. Am I? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Address of ISO 3166 mailing list
I attach confirmation that there is (as I expected) no ISO 3166 mailing list for discussions. Any takers for establishing one, for Sarasvati to send people to cool off in another pool?:-) mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Hello Marion, There is no ISO approved mailing list on ISO 3166 apart from the one by which I inform users of the standard of changes in ISO 3166. This is not a discussion list but rather a one-way information channel. Best regards Cord Cord Wischhofer ISO 3166/MA Secretary Tel.: +41 22 749 72 33 Fax: +41 22 749 73 49 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.iso.org/mara/iso3166 -Original Message- From: Marion Gunn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 2003-06-03 17:00 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Address of ISO 3166 mailing list(s), if any Dear [EMAIL PROTECTED], Can you supply the addresses of approved 3166 mailing list(s), if any, please? With best wishes, mg
Re: Language Tags and Character Sets
Scríobh Philippe Verdy [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ... Language variants are not distinct because of a national border ut because a long history of separation of peoples and atachment of peoples to an origin culture in times of political conflicts or repressions. ... That is true. As a dialectologist by calling, I must agree with you there. Then English in each area can be correctly labelled: en-IE is general English as spoken in the whole Ireland. ... That is what I would like to use for Hiberno-English, if it has not already been registered. I also feel very strongly that cultures overlapping international boundaries should be tagged by consensus between relevant national bodies (in this case BSI and NSAI), rather than fall victim to inexpert advice. I am not sure why this discussion goes into the Unicode list... That is a technically messy story. Do you recall my supplying 'quick brown fox' examples, showing Irish has a different Unicode/ISO 10646 character set to Gaelic and Manx, which have their own distinctive charsets? Well, there is some interest in the university here in extending that approach to see if we could do the same with frequency measures of IPA charsets to tentatively fix borders between dialects, treating sounds as isoglosses, as it were, in tandem with our usual syntactic/wordstore analyses. No idea if that would work, but it is something I wish to raise first within a more local NSAI forum. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Address of ISO 3166 mailing list
I ask the patience of the Unicode and IETF-L moderators for now posting on their lists this request for contact details for the ISO 3166 mailing lists (if any). Context: Ireland advisability of reserving 'EI' tag for cited usage (baggage-handling at international airports) and the fact I am only discovering now that some things such as this, which I had taken for granted as being registered/reserved for/by NSAI have yet to be so registered/reserved. For this I blame only my own failure to discover this until lately. Thanks, mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
ISO 3166-1 decoding table [was: Re: Northern Ireland]
Scríobh Misha Wolf: The full details of all the codes are available in a very nice table at: http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/ iso_3166-1_decoding_table.html ... Misha Thanks. As Head of successive NSAI ISO Delegations I used to keep rafts of such refs, many of which need updating now, which is why dedicated mailing lists, where such exist, are most likely to help. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Address of ISO 3166 mailing list
Scríobh Philippe Verdy [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ... Shamely, the official ISO3166-1 code for United Kingdom is GB, not UK which is just a IANA assignment, both of which include Northern Ireland, and also other UK dependancies (but only in ISO3166-1, because IANA defines separate codes for dependancies and overseas areas having a local form of governance with semi-autonomous status within the United Kingdom, exactly the same way it occurs for dependancies of France, USA, China, Chile, Peru). Yes. It is because such things are so complex that I would recommend that anything touching on such registrations be handled by consensus between BSI and NSAI (not left to other means). ISO3166-1 has its known problems (even if it's still better than FIPS which forgets to encode many areas, or that uses codes specific to a US government usage, and does not match any code used in the referenced country), ISO3166-2 is even worse (many errors and omissions, but still much less than FIPS which is very incoherent!) Is there an public access website for decoding USA FIPS tags to national level? There's no clear solution for you, so if you need to use a code in a delimited context (such as baggage registration in airports), the best way is to use a code that matches the uses in the air sector (for example the international codes for airports, which is an abreviation of the city name or the name of one of the airports for that city, such as JFK for New York). Most of us know many city codes by heart, but they do not meet the case. ... (forget = the definitions of ISO 3166-2, which is too much incomplete, unstable, unmaintained, still lacks a policy... It is the responsibility of the Registration Authority to fix all that. You won't find these codes in ISO3166. You need to find reference from the international air regulation authorities. Every plane, every boat, every car, has a country-of-origin registration, I think, but it is not easy to come by tables cross-matching them all (IE-EI-IRL I know, but not the delimiters between their areas of application). Alternatively, you could use the United Nation numeric codes used for statistics reports, and that are very well maintained (needed because accurate statistics are the common base for international negociations and diplomacy, and these take into account common area divisions or groupings such as Northern Ireland, or European Union, or OECD countries, or members or parties to international alliances or treaties such as NATO)... To which I would add football and other sporting organizations. Does the list never end?:-) If you need samples of these UN 3-digit codes, look at the many statistics and reports published on the UN web site. Some reports require paying a small fee to contribute to UN activities. The UN reference list can be ordered (look on the website for details). -- Philippe. The need for a concentrated effort on registering/reserving codes for Ireland and cross-matching them is one area I wish to see NSAI concentrating on at the moment, as a matter of urgency. That may seem selfish, but it is necessary to look out for one's own countries in all of these matters, or others may determine them (sans guarantee of satisfaction in any quarter). mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Not snazzy (was: New Unicode Savvy Logo)
Ar 17:51 +0200 2003/05/29, scríobh Philippe Verdy: .. I would prefer to say that Netscape 4.0 is dead, but Netscape 4.7x is not (I D'accord. (With the above I'd have to agree.) see no reason why users should continue to use versions before 4.7, as the 4.7 version fixed a lot of interoperability problems, including cross-platform compatibility with other Netscapes, plus many security fixes...) Yes. Netscape 6+ is still too new with its new operating model, and lacks the level Again - after some scary experiences with 6+ - yes, I'd have to agree. ... However the recent versions of Netscape 7+ based on the new Mozilla Gecko engine include a lot of performance enhancements in the JavaScript engine, Really? Most mail I get seems to be generated by MicroSoft Office slaves. ... Only stable parts of the development are optimized, to avoid creating unmaintainable source code. ... There you lose me, as I do not comprehend the above sentence - could you rephrase it, perhaps? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: FW: The role of country codes/Not snazzy
Thank you, Peter - for the first time in years, I find we two share some measure of agreement. Perhaps this planet your people and mine inhabit may yet be saved.:-) mg Brian on 05/29/2003 09:37:31 AM: Why is Ethnologue flawed? Because: 1. research that has gone into it has only been going on for 50 years with limited manpower, not 150 with unlimited manpower; 2. linguistic and sociolinguistic change is on-going, and it is difficult to keep research current on all of the change that occurs (see 1); and especially 3. language as a phenomenon does not occur in discrete, sharply defined categories, but involves a large number of possible parameters of variation; hence, any attempt to enumerate languages must be the result of a process of analytical abstraction that merely approximates reality (but is still useful, and is done because in practical terms organisations must conduct their business in terms of a finite list of entities rather than an all-but-endlessly variable continuum). As John Cowan said, any aspiration of a flawless catalogue of languages is a pipe-dream; and I'd also add, it's naive. - Peter --- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: my browser ... puts up a box
Ar 12:25 -0400 2003/05/31, scríobh John Cowan: Marion Gunn scripsit: What, then, is the code for the English of 'Northern Ireland'? (GB+NI=UK.) GB is, for better and worse, the code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. No one has ever requested a code for Ulster English: should anyone do so, its proper form would have to be devised for the purpose. Ulster has 9 counties (3 south of NI's border, 6 north): I must ask if JC is personally proposing to reduce Ulster to 2/3, expressing a radically new USA policy, or broadcasting for Reuters (some of us lay odds on the 3rd option)? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: my browser ... puts up a box
Ar 12:25 -0400 2003/05/31, scríobh John Cowan: Marion Gunn scripsit: What, then, is the code for the English of 'Northern Ireland'? (GB+NI=UK.) GB is, for better and worse, the code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. No one has ever requested a code for Ulster English: should anyone do so, its proper form would have to be devised for the purpose. Ulster has 9 counties (3 south of NI's border, 6 north): I must ask if JC is personally proposing to reduce Ulster to 2/3, expressing a radically new USA policy, or broadcasting for Reuters (some of us lay odds on the 3rd option)? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: my browser ... puts up a box
Scríobh Mark Crispin [EMAIL PROTECTED]: What does this have to do with ietf-languages or unicode? Some of us here decide to present the following question, Mark: What, then, is the code for the English of 'Northern Ireland'? (GB+NI=UK.) And got a political proposal from Reuters, which is of no help. Do you (in Washington.EDU) have some response to that question? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Language Tag Registrations
Dear IANA [EMAIL PROTECTED], we wish to ask whether the following is a legitimate question for your registry, which people here believe it is: What, then, is the code for the English of 'Northern Ireland'? (GB+NI=UK.) Since Ulster, as IANA [EMAIL PROTECTED] knows, is divided by an international border, is the logical reply 'encode Ulster English separately for each side of the border'? Is Basque separately 'lang-tagged' for ES and FR? We ask, because we do not know, and if you do not know either, that is okay, and we wish you well in bringing all queries to harmonious conclusions, if possible. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
RE: The role of country codes/Not snazzy
These silly threads seem to indicate too many people on these two lists are underemployed or interested in developing smokescreens for other activities. When a reference to using embryonic ISO 639-3 to 'legitimize' SIL's flawed Ethnologue is let pass with no comment, but followed only by a feeding frenzy over a logo (on [EMAIL PROTECTED]) and more of Jon Hanna's mishearings of some English spoken in Ireland, plus John Cowan's pet 4-letter word (on ietf-l), one has to ask why more serious professionals do not sign off those lists. No disrespect to Sarasvati, who likes real debates on his unicode lists, or to the person(s) who convene the ietf list(s), but (in the hope of reaching people on those lists still interested in cultural diversity), may I say that en-IE is most commonly used to indicate a locale with a different currency, etc., to either en-US or en-UK/GB. mg Scríobh John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Jon Hanna scripsit: ... I still maintain that however, especially those examples of each of those dialects that are furthest from received en), I can't think of a single spelling difference between en-IE and en-GB, The vowel in f*ck. :-) ... -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.ccil.org/~cowan -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
A new font called Gentium
Sharing with you a msg received today from a friend. How good is Gentium, and can it be used on a Mac? Anyone put it through all its paces - punctum delens, etc.? mg = Dear colleagues, Just thought I'd share a discovery about a new font called Gentium which is excellent for diacritics. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/index.html and used like any other font in Microsoft Word etc. With Gentium you can even place a dot / punctum delens over consonants, which is a godsend to students of Old Irish. Another thing I learnt recently is that in Microsoft Word for Windows 97-2000 a much more painless way than trawling the Symbol Box for letters with diacritics is to install a freeware add-on called UNIQODER. This adds two menus to the menu bar which makes entering Unicode characters much easier. This is available from http://hem.fyristorg.com/dahloe/uniqoder/ [...] -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Handwritten EURO sign
I wonder if any Unicoders have seen the handwritten EURO sign which differs substantially from the usual computer-generated kind? The one on the banknotes (lefthanded Crescent Moon with double bar) is quite unlike one used around here (rounded reversed digit THREE with double bar). Any ideas? Reminded to post this by seeing the latter in very large handwriting yesterday, at the pay-in desk to popular football grounds close to where I live. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: FW: New version of TR29:
Arsa Doug Ewell: John Cowan jcowan at reutershealth dot com wrote: How about this heuristic: Break after an apostrophe that is the second or third letter in the word. Do not break after apostrophes that come later. This neatly handles (I think) all the English, Italian, and Esperanto cases, and a good many of the French ones. I' m not sure this would work. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California And I' m sure John Cowan's above 'heuristic' wouldn' t work, either in a 'Celtic' environment or in common 'Celtic-contaminated' (non-elided) English (where one must NOT break where two capital letters are separated by an apostrophe). [To address Marco]: I think a sentence of cimaUTR29_4.html Rationale needs to be changed, so as to accommodate the 'ornamental' use of an intrusive apostrophe to anglicize Irish surnames, where 'The apostrophe is [NOT] part of the word that precedes it, and an implicit word break comes [NOT] after it.' O'Donnell Abú! mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: FW: New version of TR29:
Arsa Doug Ewell: John Cowan jcowan at reutershealth dot com wrote: How about this heuristic: Break after an apostrophe that is the second or third letter in the word. Do not break after apostrophes that come later. This neatly handles (I think) all the English, Italian, and Esperanto cases, and a good many of the French ones. I' m not sure this would work. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California And I' m sure John Cowan's above 'heuristic' wouldn' t work, either in a 'Celtic' environment or in common 'Celtic-contaminated' (non-elided) English (where one must NOT break where two capital letters are separated by an apostrophe). [To address Marco]: I think a sentence of cimaUTR29_4.html Rationale needs to be changed, so as to accommodate the 'ornamental' use of an intrusive apostrophe to anglicize Irish surnames, where 'The apostrophe is [NOT] part of the word that precedes it, and an implicit word break comes [NOT] after it.' O'Donnell Abú! mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: FW: New version of TR29:
ps. In re the 'ornamental' use of the apostrophe to anglicize Irish surnames, I believe that practice to be unique to English (viz., inserting an apostrophe where nothing is omitted, and it does not function as a punctuation mark). Am I wrong, or is what I call the English practice actually unique to English, and has anyone proposed a separate encoding of it,:-) or is it enough to just adapt Marco's TR29 proposal in the direction I suggested to accommodate it? mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Mac OS X Keyboard Layouts (was Re: new version of Keyman)
Arsa Deborah Goldsmith [EMAIL PROTECTED]: There is lots of good news about keyboards in Mac OS X 10.2, none of Thank you for that rapid, if intriguing response, Deborah. which I'm allowed to discuss until August 24, unfortunately. If you have signed an Apple non-disclosure agreement, write me privately and I have (signed many an Apple non-disclosure agreement), the first of which over a decade ago, established EGT's symbiotic relationship with Apple and enabled my series of translations of generations of Apple Mac operating systems into Irish - not to mention several much-loved Claris products in the interim - here's a big 'hi' to any ex-Claris people reading this.:-) Please write to me privately, as one always bound by those agreements, Deborah. If you could answer, as well, another question of great importance to my local community, I'd appreciate that, Deborah - the question is (given that EGT fostered/financed the development and distributed free-of-charge via its own site for so many years the keyboards made in-house here to serve many small linguistic communities), will Apple's new keyboards (including those for the 'Celtic' languages) be free of charge to users (that is, will EGT's policy of not charging end-users a penny for their use be continued)? I hope it will, mg I'll blab about all of it. :-) I will be discussing all this and more at the San Jose Unicode conference, which, thankfully, is after August 24. I will try to post something on August 24 giving the basics. Deborah Goldsmith Manager, Fonts Unicode Apple Computer, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Mac OS X Keyboard Layouts (was Re: new version of Keyman)
Arsa Deborah Goldsmith [EMAIL PROTECTED]: There is lots of good news about keyboards in Mac OS X 10.2, none of Thank you for that rapid, if intriguing response, Deborah. which I'm allowed to discuss until August 24, unfortunately. If you have signed an Apple non-disclosure agreement, write me privately and I have (signed many an Apple non-disclosure agreement), the first of which over a decade ago, established EGT's symbiotic relationship with Apple and enabled my series of translations of generations of Apple Mac operating systems into Irish - not to mention several much-loved Claris products in the interim - here's a big 'hi' to any ex-Claris people reading this.:-) Please write to me privately, as one always bound by those agreements, Deborah. If you could answer, as well, another question of great importance to my local community, I'd appreciate that, Deborah - the question is (given that EGT fostered/financed the development and distributed free-of-charge via its own site for so many years the keyboards made in-house here to serve many small linguistic communities), will Apple's new keyboards (including those for the 'Celtic' languages) be free of charge to users (that is, will EGT's policy of not charging end-users a penny for their use be continued)? I hope it will, mg I'll blab about all of it. :-) I will be discussing all this and more at the San Jose Unicode conference, which, thankfully, is after August 24. I will try to post something on August 24 giving the basics. Deborah Goldsmith Manager, Fonts Unicode Apple Computer, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
Re: Unicode certification - was RE: Dublin Conference/StandardDisclaimer
Arsa James Kass wrote: Any series of books which begins with the complete destruction of Earth is bound to be amusing, eh? Best regards, James Kass. Book 4 deals more with the creation of a new/alternative earth, James! In any case, as this is way off-topic, might I bring it back, via my earlier suggestion, as elaborated on by David Possin (below). It's perfectly acceptable for Unicode to confine itself to providing tables as touchpoints for those (its consortium members and others) actually making builds implementing principles set out in its publication. It would not require the whole consortium to get involved in the minutiae of what David describes below (a couple of boys in a backroom could do it) via a sort of Tucows site set up, giving Unicode-friendly ratings, or even broad compliance with MES/BMP/whatever, with no guarantee of performance, beyond what David has indicated. Sounds like a real time-saver, or is that a real-time saver?:-) mg David Possin wrote: It would be intereting and helpful to be able to find out if a product is Unicode-compliant before purchasing it. There are various test institutions out there that perform that work for other standards. I don't think it would be Unicode.org's responsibility to provide for the certification, to avoid membership issues, maybe it should create the certification requirements, though. I find myself wasting a lot of time figuring out if a third-party product or a certain version can handle Unicode and/or up to which version it is compliant to. I would like to be able to see a little Unicode logo on a box stamped with a release number, making it the manufacturer's responsibility to prove it. It works for operating system releases and other stuff, why not here as well? Dave = Dave Possin Globalization Consultant www.Welocalize.com -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Re: Unicode certification - was RE: Dublin Conference/StandardDisclaimer
Arsa James Kass : ... The couple of boys in the back room could do it, and possibly figure out a way to do it profitably... My thought exactly. But, to voice such equals soliciting business.:-) Still, a good idea, by all accounts. mg James Kass -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Dublin Conference: Re: ISO/IEC 10646 versus Unicode
For more than a year I have been so busy rebuilding my own company and juggling community responsibilities and invalid care, that I have had little time to keep up with Unicode/10646 club activities. I also have US spam of the nastiest kind running at over 80% of my e-mails, so I tend to avoid communicating by e-mail now, as much as I can, so I'll keep this msg brief, and hope it is acceptable. Please let me try again to ask about progress made, in that year, in re Unicode/10646, whose activities, I repeat, EGT supported financially for many years (I also repeat that I still support Unicode in principle, and can do so now with a much lighter heart, with that financial burden at last removed). This year's Unicode conference seemed so marred by avoidable blundering (some disagree with me on that) that I felt moved to offer certain comments, which still stand, as posted, and, although only referring to Ireland, I hope they may influence planning around other conferences in other host countries. I am genuinely curious to know if Unicode still has an unusual company structure of only one indian and many chiefs (a US expression, no insult), or whether it now, like most IT companies, employs plenty of indians and only a few chiefs (directors). I know ISO/IEC 10646 can not be made any exception to ISO rules which demand a review every 5 years, and I would like to know what stage it is at now, or what the main elements driving/preventing WG 2 progess on that may be. I also still want to know about implementaions (Unicode may not consider its brief to cover implemenations, the companies which combine to make the consortium sure do, and it would be nice of them to say how many such implementations are now MES/BMP-compliant, or whatever - please cut through the terminology to the meaning). A scan of my mailbox shows 8 responses to my mail of yesterday. I have yet to read those responses, so, if the answers to the above questions have already been posted, you can disregard my posting them in this msg. Sarasvati has written to me privately, concerning job advertising on the list. I shall not do that again. I hope this helps. mg Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Re: Dublin Conference: Re: ISO/IEC 10646 versus Unicode
Arsa Kenneth Whistler: ... This can easily be found by checking current resolutions of WG2. Those are also a matter of public record, being open (unlocked) SC2 documents. The latest are the resolutions from the Dublin WG2 meeting: http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/open/02n3614.pdf ... Thanks. Merging the 2 parts is an advance on last year. I see nothing else unusual in those mins, bar the failure to spell Newgrange correctly.:-) mg -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Re: Dublin Conference: Re: ISO/IEC 10646 versus Unicode
Arsa Doug Ewell: ... Unicode does not create, or even certify or register, implementations of its standard. I have been paying attention to Unicode for 10 years now, at least casually, and I have never seen anything from the Unicode Consortium that gave me the impression they were in the implementation business. Member companies, yes, but not the Consortium. I only saw it as the simple equation Membercomany1 + Membercompany2 = Consortiumcompany (that is, the sum of its individual members), with relevant new sw packages/upgrades promoted by Unicode members as just that: as approved implementations of the standard they 'consort' to create, and for there to be a growing registry to match, but I see now that was either wishful thinking, or thinking too far ahead, which can often happen. mg -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Re: Dublin Conference: Re: ISO/IEC 10646 versus Unicode
Arsa Lisa Moore: Dear Marion, After checking the mail lists upon returning from vacation/holiday, I found the following comment on the most recent Unicode conference in Dublin rather surprising... I missed reading mail over the wkend myself, Lisa - I was away cavorting in the provinces, with sweet-smelling horses nibbling on my collar.:-) As a matter of fact, we specifically designed the Dublin Unicode Conference to tie in with the substantial Dublin localization industry. I am quite That is what I had been expecting since plans to hold a conference in Dublin were first mooted some yrs ago, and why, since its planners had had ample time since then, I was very surprised Unicode failed to fill all, or even most of the main 'Éire/Ireland' slots on its panels with Irish experts based in Dublin. sorry if this purpose was misunderstood. Our keynote speaker you refer to was from the Localization Research Institute of the University of Limerick. The speaker you selected knows his stuff, seems glad to be in LU, and LU equally glad to have him, and I hope that, unlike Ken, he didn't take my earlier mail as any kind of an insult, Ireland being very much a place of provincial pride, and everyone proud of his/her own province - I love participating in LU workshops and giving the odd lecture in LU (home of some of the best of Irish expertise), but I could hardly but have more pride in the IT/Linguistics Departments of Dublin's universities, and think their lack of platform places at 'Dublin' Conference Unicode's loss, not theirs. I also believe that (whatever Unicode's usual protocol) it would have been smart to reserve the 'Éire/Ireland' designation for Irish experts at its Dublin conference, and US/Germany/wherever for speakers of different origins, as do other conferences visiting here (even dual-labelling would have been ok). It is too bad that you were not able to attend, particularly since you have Well able, but chose not to, for reasons I hope you can now begin to appreciate. a great interest in Unicode implementations (as do I). We were able to showcase implementations ranging from top US IT businesses, to many Great to have top US IT participation, as always. interesting worldwide case studies, localization, etc. I think you would have enjoyed it (in addition to the local pub:-). The locals didn't miss out on the pub, Lisa - no conference could drive Dubliners away from their usual haunts - but surely it would have been that much more enjoyable, had Unicode made as much room for locals on its Conference platform, as locals made our Unicode visitors in the hotel bar? Implementation is truly where the rubber meets the road, to use an American idiom. In this regard, the conferences have a goal to champion So I understood - and don't get all this heat on the list when asked about 'implementaion'. leading edge Unicode implementations. I particularly enjoyed hearing from a British mobile phone company at the Dublin conference... Most enjoyable, I'm sure. May we take it that, when Unicode nest visits London/Berlin, people from 'Éire/Ireland', in keeping with Unicode's 'Dublin protocol', will be offered the best of the 'UK'/'DE' seats?:-) Seriously, though, may I ask you if you are on the staff of Unicode, Lisa, and, if so, how many permanent, full-time staff does it have? I was once told Unicode's entire staff consisted of one contract worker (Rick McGowan), and given to understand that that was one of the main reasons your company required such a lot of practical assistance from other companies (including EGT). Maybe that is no longer correct. Is it? Not that size really matters: EGT has always been small, yet, having just won more contracts in the past 3 quarters than in the previous 2 years, my partner in EGT and I would like to maintain they modest, but steady profit margins we have today, and to increase them, if possible, through careful investment in worthwhile projects (Unicode was a worthwhile project - just not worth the thousands per year it cost EGT!). I wish to invite useful suggestions on short-term IT projects from people able to honour confidentiality agreements and understand the technical aspects, to work for EGT on a paid or profit-sharing basis. To return to matters more important to other list members, let me say that I appreciate Peter Constable's attempt to reply to my badly-phrased query, and ask him, making due allowance for my ignorance, to tell me what WG32's timetable for 10646 now is. mg -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Re: ISO/IEC 10646 versus Unicode
Arsa Kenneth Whistler: Marion Gunn wrote: How many years does it take to get ISO/IEC work item accepted, then develop the corresponding Standard to publication stage, Ken? In the case of 10646, approximately 10 years, Marion. ... 10 years? And Unicode, after eleven long years, has yet to produce the promised Universal Character Set/Implementations of 10646. Any fool can chuck missiles from the discarded rockheaps of history, but I do know what my company understood itself to be investing in through many expensive years of supporting Unicode. It was in the Universal Character Set and 10646 Implemenations, which I still hope to see Unicode produce, or at least a reasonable timetable offered. Does Unicode have a reasonable timetable to offer? mg -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Re: ISO/IEC 10646 versus Unicode
Arsa Kenneth Whistler: ... I think this is a misunderstanding of the self-understood brief of the Unicode Consortium. It was ad hoc, certainly, but its purpose was not producing implementations of 10646. The original Purpose of the Unicode Consortium, as stated in the Bylaws filed in the Articles of Incorportation of the corporation on January 3, 1991 was: This Corporation's purpose shall be to standardize, maintain and promote a standard fixed-width, 16-bit character encoding that provides an allocation for more than 60,000 graphics characters. If you read my msg, you will see that I (carefully) never referred to Unicode's 'original purpose', Ken, only to what I understood to be its 'agreed purpose' in relation to implementing 10646, an agreement reached after argumentation, which we need not repeat here, caused by your initial decision to set up a competing standard [sic]. That was two years *before* ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 was published. How many years does it take to get ISO/IEC work item accepted, then develop the corresponding Standard to publication stage, Ken? More than two? Several, as you well know: 10646 work was already _years_ under way before the 'Articles of Incorporation' of Unicode were filed. ... This was and is quite clear. The Unicode Consortium is a standardization organization, and its activities revolve around the care and support of the Unicode Standard. It never has been a group just dedicated to figuring out how to implement 10646... Yet that is the basis on which those already involved in 10646 accepted it, and, to put it quite bluntly, what those of us who accepted it wanted then was to put an end of the hard-sell by global IT vendors of faulty software (unable to display or sort the standard characters needed by 100s of languages), and an 10646-Unicode agreement seemed the best way to end that (I still think it is, and strongly support it). To conclude on a lighter note, if one tinged with black humour - Dublin being home to 3 universities at the cutting edge of IT - why - of awl da bars in awl da wurrall - did Unicode pick on a hotel favoured by myself, my friends and my workmates - then ship into that space a provincial university for full-day workshop the Éire/Ireland seat on several panels? Hard to ignore.:-) mg -- Marion Gunn * E G T (Estab.1991) vox: +353-1-2839396 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Contae Átha Cliath; Éire
Re: Astral planes again (was: RE: Plane One use,was Re: HTML Validation)
Arsa Kenneth Whistler: Rick Cameron suggested: Would it be useful to have one term for planes 1-16 and another for all planes above the BMP? Perhaps the former are astral and the latter celestial. ;^) ... --Ken How about INFRA- and SUPRA-? mg -- Marion Gunn ** EGT ** http://www.egt.ie ** [EMAIL PROTECTED] * 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Áth Cliath; Éire * guth/vox: +353-1-383 9396 ** facsa/fax: +353-1-269 4409 *
Re: origin of term caron
An (inebriated) American in Paris? mg Arsa Alistair Vining: Asmus Freytag wrote: At 06:32 PM 10/24/01 -0500, G. Adam Stanislav wrote: The first time I encountered the term caron was in the eighties when studying the design of Adobe PostScript fonts. Not being a native English speaker, I simply took it for the English word for this diacritic. This opens up the possibility that the SC2 people at that time cribbed from Adobe... Or vice versa. Any Adobe corporate historian out there? Perhaps it was the same person who confused guillemots with guillemets... Al. -- Marion Gunn ** EGT ** http://www.egt.ie ** [EMAIL PROTECTED] * 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Áth Cliath; Éire * guth/vox: +353-1-383 9396 * facsa/fax: +353-1- 269 4409 *
Putting unicode@unicode.org first (in the To:field)
Might I make one suggestion, to make life easier for recipients of msgs? (NB. Advice not for list owners, but for users.) If you wish to make [EMAIL PROTECTED] one recipient among several, would you mind making it the _first _ recipient? Not doing so had the effect of force-filing the attached incoming msg from Juliusz Chroboczek under 'Dennis L. Goyette Sr.', instead of 'Unicode'! Taking as an example that msg just come in from Juliusz (no reflection on him, just using his mail as an example), please see its headers (below) and note that unless [EMAIL PROTECTED] comes first in the To: field, not just second, third, or relegated to a Cc: place, there's many a mail filter which will probably not be able to use that information for filtering purposes. Just a suggestion for users which I think would really help. mg Subject: Re: Displaying unicode. Date: 04 Apr 2001 14:53:01 +0100 From: Juliusz Chroboczek [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Dennis L. Goyette Sr." [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] References: 1 , 2 ... -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
[unicode] OT (spam)
Sorry if this appears off-topic, but I need to go 'hidden' as a subscriber on this list because spamming has become such a problem for me I hardly get to read Unicode mail, getting _big_daily_ postings from [EMAIL PROTECTED], whose webmasters and postmasters ignore appeals to stop sending spam in full colour magazine format, slowing down my mail deliveries, for which, in Ireland, we have to pay by the minute for dial-in, and in a language I cannot read -- Spanish -- so I couldn't have subscribed to it, not even by accident. Please bear with me while I ask a Standards question: is there no maintenance agency for issuing DOT-COM addresses? Seems to me that there is absolutely no control on either the issuing of or the abuse of DOT-COM addresses. Other spam (virility aids, etc.) I can ignore, but this persistent stuff freezes my mailer for x amount of time every day, costing money I cannot afford on a daily basis. As of now, I feel like sending my telephone bills to the DOT-COM Maintenace Agency (if there is such a thing). Is there? mg -- Marion Gunn * Everson Gunn Teoranta 27 Pirc an Fhithlinn; Baile an Bhthair; th Cliath; ire (Ireland) +353-1-283 9396, +353-1-478 2597. http://www.egt.ie/ 15 Port Chaeimhghein ochtarach; Baile tha Cliath 2; ire (Ireland)
[unicode] Re: Moving mail lists
Arsa [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You are right, this may not be very useful for whom wish to filter their mail, but we better keep it in mind that this may be very useful for whom do not/can not filter their mail. Those whom can filter their mail also can alter the subject line easily with, for example, small perl script. So I support current setup done by Sarasvati. So do I. I still think Sarasvati could save himself some headaches by buying LISTSERV, rather than LISTAR, but I applaud his initiative in going for one of the two most stable list management systems around, and I look forward to just letting him get on with installing that. mg -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
[unicode] Re: Spam being sent to the list?
Arsa Michael (michka) Kaplan One of the BEST things a list should do of course is not let spam in, but I definitely just got a piece of mail through the list that was spam (a mail about "being a bigger man", to put it politely!). Strange thing about the new culture, the irreconcilable wishe for men to become, ahem, ever bigger, and women ever smaller.:-) I would hope that this is being dealt with appropriately so that non members of the list will not be allowed post to it? That is easily done under LISTSERV (equally easily, I would guess, under LISTAR). The mail was listed as being from [EMAIL PROTECTED] if that helps track down how it got through. It is easy to set up Eudora (or similar) filters to protect your professional address against e-mail from 'free' addresses (that is, from people who have no professional address). mg michka -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
Re: Klingon silliness
Arsa Michael Everson: At 13:05 -0800 2001-02-27, Timothy Partridge wrote: How come the Klingons only have one language and script? :-) The victors successfully assimilated the conquered. -- Michael Everson Sure they can assimilate? I'm reliably informed that they only cling on. mg -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
Re: [OT] Re: the Ethnologue
Arsa Antoine Leca: CITE Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu could be considered co-dialects, but have important sociolinguistic differences. Hindi uses the Devanagari writing system, and formal vocabulary is borrowed from Sanskrit, de-Persianized, de-Arabicized. Literary Hindi, or Hindi-Urdu, has four varieties: Hindi (High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, Literary Hindi, Standard Hindi)... /CITE from the online Ethnologue database, 13th ed. URL:http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Inda.html#HND Mm. Maybe a more polite (more PC) turn of phrase might be found than "could be considered co-dialects", which more than implies, it postulates the existence of a standard language referent of which the above "could" be considered dialects. Someone this week, I think it might have been on this list, spoke of languages as being "allied" to each other. I rather like that. Would it be acceptable to suggest replacing "co-dialects" with "allied languages"? mg Of course, Peter and many people here know that I am taking the worst possible example. Perhaps one may also fill reports to make clearer that most if not all of these different entries are mutually intelligible (at least to the extend that the language I am speaking when speaking of linguistics or of Unicode is intelligible to the average French-speaking person). Antoine -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
Re: [OT] Re: the Ethnologue
Arsa Kevin Bracey: As far as I'm aware the co- prefix does mean an equal grouping. Examples that spring to mind are co-worker, co-conspirator, co-exist, coincidence and co-operative. I thought co-dialects was a cunningly concise way of saying that they could all be considered dialects of each other... And so it is, but even the concept "peer" is misleading (some "co-dialects" priding themselves on being "more equal" than others of their group, some members of which they may abhor, and deprecate for legal use in their land), which is also why I favour "allied languages", which neatly sidesteps the question of hierarchical relationships, real, implied, or created for any political purpose, so that Croatian-Bosnian-Serbian then become linguistic allies for solid linguistic reasons, nothing more implied. mg -- Kevin Bracey Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
Re: New Locale Proposal
Whatever. So the most _practical_ advice for people whose languages have no ISO 639 code at present (neither a two- nor a three-letter code) is not to waste their time applying for a two-letter code (via AT InfoTerm, MA of 639-1) but to apply right now for a three-letter code (via US LOC, MA of639-2). Would that be your advice, Michael? I'm supposing that it would. mg Arsa Michael Everson: I do not think it is correct to characterize the requirements of ISO 639-2, which are set forth in that international standard, as "US LOC" requirements. They are the requirements of the international standard. Ar 10:01 -0800 2000-09-18, scríobh John Cowan: 1) A language with a 639-1 tag has and will always have a 639-2 tag as well. E.g. English has tags "eng" and "en". Yes. 2) A language which currently has a 639-2 tag but not a 639-1 tag will not get a new 639-1 tag in future. E.g. Arapaho has tag "arp" but will never have a 639-1 tag. Well, things are a little in flux until the current 639-1 DIS is finalized; some new 2-letter tags are being added. Then anything with a 3-letter code but not with a 2-letter code is stuck without a 2-letter code forever and ever. 3) Therefore, the only future 639-1 tags are those assigned to new (i.e. not in 639-2) languages, simultaneously with a 639-2 tag. E.g. Lojban, a currently untagged language, might get the tags "loj" and "lj". (When Hell freezes over.) No, just after Klingon gets them. Michael Everson ** Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.egt.ie 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland Vox +353 1 478 2597 ** Fax +353 1 478 2597 ** Mob +353 86 807 9169 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
Re: New Locale Proposal
The opposite it true, Doug. ISO 639 will ONLY issue new 639-1 (two-letter) codes for languages that already have a 639-2 (three-letter) code. That means, in effect, that the ISO 639-1/MA (AT InfoTerm) has its hands tied: it can no longer register any new lanugage tag identifiers for languages not already approved by the ISO 639-2/MA (US Library of Congress). mg Arsa Doug Ewell: Antoine Leca [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1) Normalize to single form when possible. Use ISO 639-1 code instead of 639-2 if one exists. Are you forced to re-tag every bit of data when ISO 639/RA issues a new code? From what I have heard, ISO 639/MA will not be issuing any new 639-1 (two-letter) codes for languages that already have a 639-2 (three- letter) code. So this re-tagging scenario should not occur and Carl's solution, which is the same as that proposed in RFC 1766 bis, should work fine. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
Re: New Locale Proposal
Absolutely true, John, and said far more succinctly than I did. The most significant aspect of this is that the work of registering codes should be procesed much faster in future, becuause, although for now there may still exist two separate Maintenance Agencies to process requests, aplicants applying to AT InfoTerm for 639-1 codes have, in future, as you say below, simultaneously to satisfy 639-2 US LOC requirements. mg Arsa John Cowan: Marion Gunn wrote: The opposite it true, Doug. ISO 639 will ONLY issue new 639-1 (two-letter) codes for languages that already have a 639-2 (three-letter) code. Almost, but not quite. If that were true, 639-2 tags could become effectively obsolete. The true rules AFAIU are: 1) A language with a 639-1 tag has and will always have a 639-2 tag as well. E.g. English has tags "eng" and "en". 2) A language which currently has a 639-2 tag but not a 639-1 tag will not get a new 639-1 tag in future. E.g. Arapaho has tag "arp" but will never have a 639-1 tag. 3) Therefore, the only future 639-1 tags are those assigned to new (i.e. not in 639-2) languages, simultaneously with a 639-2 tag. E.g. Lojban, a currently untagged language, might get the tags "loj" and "lj". (When Hell freezes over.) -- There is / one art || John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] no more / no less|| http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein -- Marion Gunn Everson Gunn Teoranta http://www.egt.ie
