Newbie question about text encoding

Rustom Mody rustompmody at gmail.com
Thu Feb 26 12:08:24 EST 2015


On Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 10:16:11 PM UTC+5:30, Sam Raker wrote:
> I'm 100% in favor of expanding Unicode until the sun goes dark. Doing so helps solve the problems affecting speakers of "underserved" languages--access and language preservation. Speakers of Mongolian, Cherokee, Georgian, etc. all deserve to be able to interact with technology in their native languages as much as we speakers of ASCII-friendly languages do. Unicode support also makes writing papers on, dictionaries of, and new texts in such languages much easier, which helps the fight against language extinction, which is a sadly pressing issue.


Agreed -- Correcting the inequities caused by ASCII-bias is a good thing.

In fact the whole point of my post was to say just that by carving out and 
focussing on a 'universal' subset of unicode that is considerably larger than 
ASCII but smaller than unicode, we stand to reduce ASCII-bias.

As also other posts like
http://blog.languager.org/2014/04/unicoded-python.html
http://blog.languager.org/2014/05/unicode-in-haskell-source.html

However my example listed

> > * Egyptian hieroglyphs
> > * Cuneiform
> > * Shavian
> > * Deseret
> > * Mahjong
> > * Klingon

Ok Chris has corrected me re. Klingon-in-unicode. So lets drop that.
Of the others which do you thing is in 'underserved' category?

More generally which of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_%28Unicode%29#Supplementary_Multilingual_Plane
are underserved?



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