Re: Code pages and Unicode

From: Ken Whistler <kenw_at_sybase.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:04:15 -0700

On 8/22/2011 9:58 AM, Jean-François Colson wrote:
> I wonder whether you aren’t a little too optimistic.

No. If anything I'm assuming that the folks working on proposals will
be amazingly assiduous during the next decade.

>
> Have you considered the unencoded ideographic scripts?

Why, yes I have.

>
> 1,071 hieroglyphs have already been encoded. I think there are
> approximately 4,000 more to encode.

A preliminary listing of 4548 additional hieroglyphs, based on
Hieroglyphica (1993), was
presented to WG2 in 1999. Twelve years have passed, and no additional
document has
been forthcoming to work through the issues in standardizing such a list
as characters.
I won't hold my breath, but somebody *might* get through that work by 2021.

>
> 1,165 Yi syllables and 55 Yi radicals have been encoded. But they only
> support one dialect of Yi and I read there are tens of thousands of Yi
> ideographs and that a proposal to encode 88,613 classical Yi
> characters was made 4 years ago.

88,613 classical Yi *glyphs*. This is just a collection of every glyph
form noted
from wherever. Even the proponents acknowledged that it was more on the
order of maybe 7000 *characters* involved. They got feedback to do the
homework
to work through the character/glyph model for classical Yi, and come
back when
they have a documented, reliable listing of the Yi *characters* that
need encoding,
together with the list of variants for each character. Given the nature
and scope of
the work, and no (current) indication of the progress being made, this
also *might*
get done by 2021.

>
> The threshold of 200,000 characters doesn’t seem very far.

Nah. It is still way over the extended horizon. The only big historic
ideographic
script that is close to being done is Tangut, and the wrangling even
over that one
has gone on for years now.

--Ken
Received on Mon Aug 22 2011 - 14:06:27 CDT

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