From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Aha, here's my way to get the characters I want into Unicode although they have been rejected! I find some near-bankrupt island state and persuade (with a little financial lubrication) its government to set up an official standards committee with me as the chair. I then issue an official national standard including the characters I want to get into Unicode. And, from what you say, Unicode will be obliged to accept my characters.
I understand that there have been previous attempts to define a new or
extended Cyrillic 8-but character set supporting Central Asian
languages, but that such proposals have been rejected. I hardly think
that Aso would have turned to the Unicode list if he wanted to define an
8-bit encoding.
I understand that it has been rejected for inclusion in an international standard, but still this does not forbid Tadjikistan to define its own national 8-bit standard for writing Tajik in Cyrillic... In the hope that this standard would promote the support for the characters (missing in the Cyrillic version of ISO-8859) and initiate the commercial support of appropriate keyboards and softwares for this Tajik variant.
If Tajikistan defines this standard, it will get its right of entry into the IANA database of charsets, and Unicode will have to support a complete mapping for it (if characters are missing), whever it likes it or not, and even if this standard is not accepted in a chapter of the ISO 8859 international standard...
There's no contradiction here: Tajikistan has the right to define what are its own needs for its own official language; going to an international standard can come later, once Tajikistan has proven that it helped promote the correct support of its language by various software and hardware solutions (keyboards, fonts, sorting and collating in relational databases, transcoders, filesystem file names, various communication tools including low-cost ones with limited processing resources like mobile phones and SMS messaging...).
:-)
As for Tajikistan, don't go off into wild speculations about what they might want, but let them say.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
