![]() ![]() In the case of Gurmukhi, a writing system that was originally used for Sikh scriptures and is written today by speakers of Punjabi, some argued that the shape and pronunciation of a particular letter’s current form were unfaithful to the original religious texts. Disagreements about whether to call a writing system “Old Hungarian” or “Székely-Hungarian Rovás,” for example, caused the encoding process to drag on for 17 years from the date of the first proposal. ![]() Any user in the world can propose a change to a pending writing system, and the pace of progress is dictated, in large part, by the time it takes to reach a global consensus on issues like the script’s name and the details of its characters. Since every detail of a writing system has to be debated and approved before it can even begin to be encoded, getting a script into the Unicode Standard takes a minimum of two years. Trying to write characters in an ancient language from the Italic peninsula, “I found out, ‘Well, you can’t, for an HTML page.’ You couldn’t do it because they weren’t yet in Unicode.” Anderson linked up with the Unicode technical director at the time and the current technical vice president, Ken Whistler and Rick McGowan, respectively, who asked her to be their advocate for historical scripts. Anderson, who is also a Unicode technical director, joined the cause in 2001, when her work on a publication for Indoeuropean languages at UCLA led her to a roadblock. Encoded writing systems include newly minted scripts like Adlam, an alphabet created in the 1980s for the 40 million speakers of Fulani across Africa, as well as ancient writing systems like Coptic, the Egyptian language that has been pivotal for biblical studies. The SEI has shepherded nearly 100 scripts into the Unicode Standard, with many more on the horizon. “People really want those-well, not the broccoli-but they really want some of these emoji on their phones.”Īnderson leads Berkeley’s Script Encoding Initiative, a project that helps those who want new scripts encoded to draw up compelling proposals and make their writing systems as ready for the transition into the Unicode Standard as possible. “The thing about the emoji is that they are so wildly popular,” says Deborah Anderson, a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. While these companies are in theory supportive of making the scripts of lower-profile languages available, consumer demand for emoji plays a large part in keeping the Unicode Standard updated. Each version includes entirely new writing systems, along with additional letters and symbols for already encoded ones, meaning that, when devices update to get the newest emoji, they also gain access to any other new or revised characters that the Unicode team has developed. While, on the one hand, emoji eat up the time of the already strapped volunteers who could be working on other scripts, customer demand for emoji also incentivizes voting members of the Unicode Consortium like Microsoft, Apple, and Google’s Alphabet to update their systems with each new version that Unicode releases. Crucial as these steps toward cultural empowerment may be, it is the textable faces, socks, mermen, and the like that have brought this global standard into the limelight.Īs Michael Erard, writer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, recently pointed out in the New York Times, the incorporation of emoji into Unicode is a double-edged sword for those interested in preserving ancient and minority languages. Also newly available is Zanabazar Square, created by a Mongolian monk in the seventeenth century to write spiritual texts in Mongolian, Tibetan, and Sanskrit. The scripts introduced this year include Nüshu, a writing system that was developed by women in the Hunan Province of nineteenth-century China as a workaround when they were denied formal education. In June 2017, the Unicode Consortium rolled out its tenth version in 26 years, which included four scripts as well as the Bitcoin sign and 56 new emoji. But there are more than a hundred writing systems to go. Given that alphabets like Cyrillic, Arabic, and Devanagari serve more than 60 languages each and that 500 languages use the Latin alphabet, Unicode makes electronic communication possible in almost a thousand languages. ![]() Made up of a mix of academics, stakeholders, and interested volunteers, the Unicode Consortium has encoded 139 of the writing systems, technically known as scripts, ever to have existed. Unicode is the international encoding standard that makes it possible for users to read, write, and search in a wide range of written languages on all manner of devices without technical miscommunication. ![]()
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