On Friday, June 21, 2002, at 12:37 , Eric Hildum wrote:
> Note that Unicode does also include "dead" languages which are no longer
> spoken - it really is intended to include everything.
which makes sense from the viewpoint of sciences like linguistics,
archeology, history, philosophy etc.
If I put myself into the shoes of a scholar who is publishing a paper on
ancient texts, or the publishers of scientific magazines in which such
papers are published regularly, I can see how unicoding of "dead"
languages will be of benefit.
There are hundreds of thousands of ancient texts which haven't even been
examined in detail yet, often due to lack of resources or lack of
access. However, in many cases they can give very important insights
into the advent and development of civilisation. Unicoding those would
give them a far wider audience and would be a blessing for the
scientific community.
Including them in the Unicode standard doesn't mean you have to install
everything on your computer, it only makes sure that it can easily be
added if and when needed.
Also, I don't think that the Unicode standard will become more complex
as a result of this as the mechanics for decoding and displaying
characters should remain the same. All there is to it are more data sets
that can be processed using the standardised process.
Of course, on a mobile phone it is very unlikely that you will ever need
to add fonts for "dead" languages". Then again, never say never.
Who knows, we may yet see VeriSign to offer domain names in Runic or
Sumerian ;-)
regards
benjamin
Received on Fri Jun 21 10:59:22 2002