Re: Origin of the digital encoding of accented characters for Esperanto

Ken,

zgrep U011D /usr/share/i18n/charmaps/*
ANSI_X3.110-1983.gz:<U011D> /xc3/x67 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH
CIRCUMFLEX
EUC-JISX0213.gz:<U011D> /xaa/xe0 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH
CIRCUMFLEX
EUC-JP.gz:<U011D> /x8f/xab/xba LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
EUC-JP-MS.gz:<U011D> /x8f/xab/xba LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH
CIRCUMFLEX
EUC-TW.gz:<U0002011D> /x8e/xa7/xac/xbc <CJK>
GB18030.gz:<U011D> /x81/x30/x8e/x34 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
IBM905.gz:<U011D> /x9b LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
ISO_6937-2-ADD.gz:<U011D> /xc3/x67 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH
CIRCUMFLEX
ISO_6937.gz:<U011D> /xc3/x67 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
ISO-8859-3.gz:<U011D> /xf8 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
ISO_8859-SUPP.gz:<U011D> /xb8 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH
CIRCUMFLEX
ISO-IR-90.gz:<U011D> /xc3/x67 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
SHIFT_JISX0213.gz:<U011D> /x85/xde LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH
CIRCUMFLEX
T.101-G2.gz:<U011D> /xc3/x67 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
T.61-8BIT.gz:<U011D> /xc3/x67 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
UTF-8.gz:<U011D> /xc4/x9d LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
VIDEOTEX-SUPPL.gz:<U011D> /xc3/x67 LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH
CIRCUMFLEX

How come this character is in ISO-8859-3? IBM905?

Leo

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Ken Whistler <kenwhistler_at_att.net> wrote:

>
>
> On 3/23/2015 8:35 AM, William_J_G Overington wrote:
>
>> Origin of the digital encoding of accented characters for Esperanto
>>
>> Twelve accented characters (uppercase versions and lowercase versions of
>> six accented letters) used for Esperanto are encoded in Unicode.
>>
>
> WJO is referring to U+0109, U+011D, U+0125, U+0135, U+015D, U+016D (and
> their uppercase pairs).
>
>
>> These may well be in Unicode as legacy encoded characters from one or
>> more earlier standards.
>>
>
> No.
>
>
>> Does anyone know please how Esperanto characters first became encoded
>> digitally?
>>
>
> In the Unicode Standard, the fact that these all occur in the Latin
> Extended-A block is
> a clue. The Latin Extended-A block dates back to Unicode 1.0. You can
> easily verify
> that by referring to the archival record. See:
>
> http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/
>
> And in fact, the exact set in the Latin Extended-A block can be traced
> even further
> back than the publication of Unicode 1.0 in 1991. That same repertoire was
> included
> in the charts distributed for public review in the Unicode 1.0 final
> review draft
> in December, 1990. So we know that the inclusion of the 12 accented
> characters
> for Esperanto in that set dates back at least that far -- which should
> eliminate a
> lot of fruitless alternative speculative theories about their origins in
> Unicode.
>
>
>> For example, was it that someone who was interested in Esperanto happened
>> to be a member of a committee that was working on encoding accented
>> characters?
>>
>
> Well, sort of. See further explanation below.
>
>
>> Or did one or more people, or a group of people, or an Esperanto society,
>> lobby for the characters to become included?
>>
>
> No.
>
>
>> Or what?
>>
>
> Well, the answer is sort of "or what". The repertoire of accented
> characters included in the
> Latin Extended-A block for the final review draft of Unicode 1.0 in
> December, 1990
> was largely culled from the even earlier list of Latin letters proposed for
> encoding in the 2nd DP (Draft Proposal) for ISO/IEC 10646-1. Their
> inclusion in
> the Unicode Standard 1.0 repertoire was one of the early compatibility
> decisions,
> to ensure that repertoire that national bodies had thought important
> enough to
> be included in the early 10646 balloting was accounted for in some way in
> the first Unicode Standard draft.
>
> The list of accented Latin letters in the Latin Extended-A block consisted
> of the
> union of all of the then-extant ISO 8859 8-bit standard repertoire for
> various
> Latin alphabets, *plus* the additional letters culled from the 2nd DP
> 10646-1.
>
> For the record, the 2nd DP 10646 was JTC1/SC2 N2066 (=WG2 N551), dated
> December 1, 1989. In that era, documents were only distributed by paper,
> and I don't know of an extant online copy, so it is rather difficult to
> track down!
>
> <speculation>
> In any event, in that document from 1989, I consider it likely that the
> person
> who probably originally assembled the lists of various European language
> alphabets and
> included them in the drafts for balloting was Hugh McGregor Ross, the
> then British editor of 10646 and a person with a passion for details about
> lesser-used writing systems. Mr. Ross is, unfortunately, recently deceased,
> so we cannot ask him directly. But I suspect that examination of the
> early drafts of 10646 and papers related to it would confirm this
> speculation
> on my part.
> </speculation>
>
> --Ken
>
>
>> It does not seem axiomatic that accented characters for Esperanto would
>> necessarily be included in a digital encoding of the accented characters
>> needed for the languages of Europe.
>>
>> William Overington
>>
>
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> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
>

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Received on Mon Mar 23 2015 - 12:11:47 CDT