> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Kirk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 4:04 PM
> To: Philippe Verdy
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Beyond 17 planes, was: Java char and Unicode 3.0+
>
> Plenty of
> room there to encode not just all the scripts of the Galactic
> Federation
> but even to squeeze in those of the Klingons and their allies!
The reason that the Klingon alphabet is not currently part of Unicode is that the Klingon Language Institute submitted a proposal for the Klingon script to the Unicode Consortium, and the Unicode consortium rejected it. I have been unable to fathom their reasons.
It seems a simple enough case to argue - EITHER the 0x110000 character space is amply big enough for everyone, as John Cowan asserts. (I quote, "Similarly, the number of characters used by the peoples of the Earth for writing their various languages is not going to be expanded by the discovery of 10,000 characters used for writing the lost script
of Atlantis. The earth is finite and small, and there's no place for large writing systems to hide from the eagle eyes of the Roadmappers."), OR it isn't, in which case there is an argument for adding more planes. [I should stress at this point the Klingon script is used by the peoples of the Earth, right here in the 21st century]. Here's what the Klingon Language Institute has to say:
It seems to me that if 0x110000 codepoints isn't a big enough space to fit in the Klingon alphabet (and other alphabets which were similarly rejected) then we need more codepoints. Simple as that. The "chicken and egg" situation described above is quite real. Esperanto speakers were writing c^, ch and even cx long before the character ĉ became available for everyone's use. More codepoints may allow more scripts not to be rejected in the first place.The Klingon pIqaD script was on the Roadmap for inclusion in Unicode for several years before it was rejected. There were many debates on its appropriateness, with one camp maintaining that fictional scripts in general, and Klingon in particular, didn't belong in Unicode. That view was eventually defeated, with the relevant criteria ending up being whether a script is used by a large enough body of users who need to exchange data, and whether it is historically important enough with respect to existing recorded data. Klingon was rejected, but it failed because its potential users don't use it. The fact is that Klingon language publications, by and large, use the Romanized transcription presented in The Klingon Dictionary. This is arguably a chicken-and-egg situation, but nobody argued that point successfully to the relevant Unicode committees.
However, being rejected doesn't mean that Klingon is not compatible with Unicode today. Some years ago, Klingon was one of the supported languages in a popular distribution of the Linux operating system, with a pIqaD -style metafont character set mapped to a specific region of the Unicode Private Use Area. That mapping has been made somewhat more "public" in the CSUR, a published list of constructed scripts:
Jill
