RE: Linguistics and Unicode

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2006 - 12:12:16 CST

  • Next message: Michael Maxwell: "RE: Linguistics and Unicode"

    It would help if you scoped your question: limitations in relation to what? (Sure there are limitations: e.g., Unicode doesn’t encode molecular structures, but neither is it intended to. But I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you had in mind.)

     

    For purposes of *linguists* wanting to encode their linguistic data, a majority will very likely find version 5.0 to be adequate.

     

    Since you mention a product, probably you also want to consider implementations of Unicode. I can say wrt Microsoft products that linguists will find very good support in Windows Vista and in Office 2003 or (even better) Office 2007. Fonts are an important consideration, and if the fonts in Vista are not adequate e.g. for phonetic transcription, the fonts that SIL International provides (in particular Doulos SIL and Charis SIL) should be useful (go to http://scripts.sil.org <http://scripts.sil.org/> ).

     

     

    Peter

     

    ________________________________

    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Luke Onslow
    Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 2:53 AM
    To: unicode@unicode.org
    Subject: Linguistics and Unicode

     

    Dear all,

     

    I am sure there are some linguistic scholar on board of this mailing list. Do you currently see any limitations of the current version of Unicode apart from the fact that there are still some writing systems that haven't been ported to Unicode. Well to be PC, I mean non-official writing systems and obsolete writing systems.

     

    I talked with a linguist friend from Germany once and he was absolutely unaware of Unicode and was sticking to the good old product he was using. Didn't give the name of the product though? Anyone knows?

     

    Regards,

    Luke

     

    ________________________________

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