Unicode

This paper describes the Linear A / Minoan digital corpus and the approaches we applied to develop it. We aim to set up a suitable study resource for Linear A and Minoan. Firstly we start by introducing Linear A and Minoan in order to make it clear why we should develop a digital marked up corpus of the existing Linear A transcriptions. Secondly we list and describe some of the existing resources about Linear A: Linear A documents (seals, statuettes, vessels etc.), the traditional encoding systems (standard code numbers referring to distinct symbols), a Linear A font, and the newest (released on June 16th 2014) Unicode Standard Characters set for Linear A. Thirdly we explain our choice concerning the data format: why we decided to digitize the Linear A resources; why we decided to convert all the transcriptions in standard Unicode characters; why we decided to use an XML format; why we decided to implement the TEI-EpiDoc DTD. Lastly we describe: the developing process (from the data collection to the issues we faced and the solving strategies); a new font we developed (synchronized with the Unicode Characters Set) in order to make the data readable even on systems that are not updated. Finally, we discuss the corpus we developed in a Cultural Heritage preservation perspective and suggest some future works.

The slides: https://www.academia.edu/14675424/Minoan_Linguistic_Resources_The_Linear_A_Digital_Corpus_-_SLIDES.

This paper is a review on terminology and usage of three horizontal dashes (-, – and —) in Croatian orthographies and orthographic papers. Considerable contradictions and inconsistencies have been spotted in both terminology
and practical use of horizontal dashes. The new Croatian Orthography, recently published by Matrix Croatica and written by Badurina, Marković and Mićanović, contributed even more to the confusion by prescribing solutions that deviate significantly from orthographic tradition and typographic practice. Practical, orthographic, and computational linguistic arguments have been stated and elaborated against these solutions. The authors propose terms spojnica, en-crtica and em-crtica for characters -, – and —. Two possible directions in the development of orthographic rules and usage have been
pointed out. The authors have also drawn attention to some other inconsistencies in orthography which should be systematized and standardized.

L'Enciclopedia Informatica tratta centinaia di argomenti in maniera semplice e chiara in modo tale che possa essere consultate sia dal neofita sia dal professionista. Acronimi, sigle, gergo tutto è spiegato senza mai dare per scontato che il lettore conosca il significato. La versione ebook ha il suo punto di forza nella possibilità di spostarsi da un argomento all'altro senza dover sfogliare centinaia di pagine. Un sistema ipertestuale dettagliato permette di andare all'argomento e tornare agli indice in un secondo. L'opera è stata pensata e indirizzata per l'uso da parte degli studenti, degli insegnanti e dei ricercatori scientifici di ogni ordine e grado.
Link anteprima gratuita:  https://www.amazon.it/dp/B08ZNKS76H

‘Avestan’ is the name of the ritual language of Zoroastrianism, which was the state religion of
the Iranian empire in Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sasanid times, covering a time span of more
than 1200 years.1 It is named after the ‘Avesta’, i.e., the collection of holy scriptures that form
the basis of the religion which was allegedly founded by Zarathushtra, also known as Zoroaster,
by about the beginning of the first millennium B.C. Together with Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan
represents one of the most archaic witnesses of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European
languages, which makes it especially interesting for historical-comparative linguistics. This is
why the texts of the Avesta were among the first objects of electronic corpus building that were
undertaken in the framework of Indo-European studies, leading to the establishment of the
TITUS database (‘Thesaurus indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien’). 2 Today, the
complete Avestan corpus is available, together with elaborate search functions3 and an extended
version of the subcorpus of the so-called ‘Yasna’, which covers a great deal of the attestation of
variant readings.4
Right from the beginning of their computational work concerning the Avesta, the compilers5
had to cope with the fact that the texts contained in it have been transmitted in a special
script written from right to left, which was also used for printing them in the scholarly editions
used until today.6 It goes without saying that there was no way in the middle of the 1980s to
encode the Avestan scriptures exactly as they are found in the manuscripts. Instead, we had to
rely upon transcriptional devices that were dictated by the restrictions of character encoding as
provided by the computer systems used. As the problems we had to face in this respect and the
solutions we could apply are typical for the development of computational work on ancient
languages, it seems worthwhile to sketch them out here.

Keynote presentation on introducing Tamil Unicode, standardization process, stability principle of Unicode, a brief review of the Tamil Symbol/Fractions proposal as well as the Tamil Virtual Academiy experts recommendation to the Government of Tamil Nadu.  Meeting on April 29th  at the University of  Madras. Session chaired by Prof. Jayadevan, Chief Editor, Madras University Tamil Lexicon Revised.

In the past decades, typography has transitioned from metal type to digital fonts. How well is digital technology serving the various writing systems around the world? How has the digital infrastructure of typography changed in the past 3 decades, and how has it enabled better visual rendering of human writing?

Arabic script remains one of the most widely employed writing systems in the world, for Arabic and non-Arabic languages alike. Focusing on naskh—the style most commonly used across the Middle East—Letters of Light traces the evolution of Arabic script from its earliest inscriptions to digital fonts, from calligraphy to print and beyond. J. R. Osborn narrates this storied past for historians of the Islamic and Arab worlds, for students of communication and technology, and for contemporary practitioners.

The partnership of reed pen and paper during the tenth century inaugurated a golden age of Arabic writing. The shape and proportions of classical calligraphy known as al-khatt al-mansub were formalized, and variations emerged to suit different types of content. The rise of movable type quickly led to European experiments in printing Arabic texts. Ottoman Turkish printers, more sensitive than their European counterparts to the script’s nuances, adopted movable type more cautiously. Debates about “reforming” Arabic script for print technology persisted into the twentieth century.

Arabic script continues to evolve in the digital age. Programmers have adapted it to the international Unicode standard, greatly facilitating Arabic presence online and in word processing. Technology companies are investing considerable resources to facilitate support of Arabic in their products. Professional designers around the world are bringing about a renaissance in the Arabic script community as they reinterpret classical aesthetics and push new boundaries in digital form.

In this paper we discuss the various ASCII based scripts that are made for Indian languages and the problems associated with these types of scripts. Then we will discuss the solution we suggest to overcome these problems in the form of " Multilingual ASCII to Unicode Converter ". We also explain the need of regional languages for the development of a person. This paper also contains information of UNICODE and various other issues related to regional languages.

You never know where a story might lead you or what questions it may leave unanswered. Take for example a story we did in January about a campaign to make the dumpling emoji a reality. Jennifer 8. Lee told us that emojis have to be approved by something called the Unicode Consortium. They're the group that creates the standards that enable people around the world to use computers in any language. She mentioned their membership includes not just tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook -- but countries, such Oman.

And that made us wonder what this one Middle Eastern country was doing there with all of those tech giants! That led us to Thomas Milo, a pioneer of computer typography and encoding. He's a partner with DecoType in the Netherlands, a company that's long been working with Arabic script technology. He also happens to be Oman's primary representative at the Unicode Consortium.

In this study, I extended input methods for the Japanese language to Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are several systems that capable of inputting Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. However, they do not allow us to directly input hieroglyphs, for instance, into MS Word. The new Egyptian hieroglyphic input system being reported here, developed using technology used for inputting Japanese writing, is quite unique and allows the direct input of hieroglyphs, for example, into MS Word. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Japanese writing system (with its mixture of hiragana, katakana and kanji) share basic graphemic characteristics. For instance, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic logograms are functionally similar to Japanese kanji logograms (Chinese characters), whereas Egyptian hieroglyphic phonograms are functionally similar to Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabic phonograms. The input technology for Japanese makes it possible to input a mixture of logograms and phonograms, and phonetic complements. This technology is a well-organized and handy tool to input Japanese writing into computers, having been used by over 100 million people. I applied this technology to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inputting and created a new intuitive hieroglyphic inputting system using Google Japanese Input. Using this method, anyone can directly write Egyptian hieroglyphic writing into software like MS Word. If the transcription of an ancient Egyptian word is entered, the correct hieroglyphs are generated by this system. If there are multiple options for any phonemic combinations that use other combinations of phonetic complements or determinatives, a dropdown window with a list of several combinations of glyphs appears and the user can choose the desired combination.

Until recently, Arabic text representation was the exclusive domain of professional calligraphers and typographers. Today it revolves around elusive computer codes and ugly fonts. Yet, scholars are expected to be able to handle literary text, archaic text as well as contemporary Qur'anic text with so-called word processors. The industry attempts to cater for such requirements, but it must do so practically without participation or professional input of academic specialists. Consequently the potential of philological computing, in fields like database research, networking and publishing, remains largely untapped.

For the creation of a complete model for handling Arabic script with information technology, exhaustive understanding of its structure is imperative. Creating such such a model involves linguistically sound computer-aided transcription for efficient data entry on the one hand and historically correct script images as professional output on the other. This is the kind of exercise where one cannot afford to take anything for granted regarding Arabic text representation.

This approach forces one to explore the opportunities of Unicode-based information technology for Arabic philology. While addressing key issues of Arabic computing, this paper takes the requirements of Qur'anic studies as the central theme: computer-aided transcription to input a clean data structure related to graphemes and archigraphemes as well as correctly shaped typography that incorporates precise rules for allographic assimilation.

The paper is based on the results of research into two faces of Arabic text: computer-aided Latin transcription and computer-synthesized Arabic script.

The technology under scrutiny creates the conditions for contrastive analysis of digital Arabic text and computer-synthesized calligraphy. This reveals unexpected relations between calligraphy, spelling and possibly even text history.

Growth of information technology has played a great role in connecting the world together. The to and fro of information is common in this world. Fonts play a key major role in this communication process in digital domain. Common encoding scheme for one language helps in loss-less digital communication. Indian fonts lacks in this zone, as no Indian font has standard encoding format for mapping characters. Numerous indic fonts were created with diverse mapping schemes. Gurmukhi as one of the prominent Indian script also suffered from this negligence. This study investigates the Gurmukhi font and Unicode converter, which works for font to font substitution and font to Unicode substitution using an algorithmic process taking intake of Gurmukhi text written in OpenXML document. This converter works for 5 ASCII based legacy Gurmukhi fonts and tries to handle the diverse mapping scheme of these fonts. It gives the hustle free substitution mechanism for both inter-font and Unicode conversion. The performance of GFUC is measure of various well-defined norms and gives 100% accuracy during conversion.

A writing system as a set of visible used to represent units of language in a systematic way. Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. In serious music textbook editor programs there is a trouble in writing documents which include Egyptian hieroglyph symbols which take more than two bytes, because there is no way to embed these symbolization in a particular document. In this paper, a special text editor designed for ancient Egyptian hieroglyph writing system which power comprehension the Egyptian hieroglyph symbols using Unicode standard, and the basic operations of a classical text editor such as operations of file manipulation (load and save), select font size, type, and color, the operations of copy, paste, cut, select all, etc. as well as print the final document. Besides this, hieroglyphic numbers were represented in this editor. More facilities, flexibility, simplicity and benefits can be gotten using these editors especially for historic research worker which they interested authors in the ancient civilization. This editor designed in Visual Basic.Net.

International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT - http://www.infitt.org) through its Unicode Working Group has reviewed the various Grantha proposals and has commented on those in the enclosed documents. The Working Group also conducted tow in-person meetings where it assembled several scholars and domain experts and the minutes of those meetings are also enclosed.

The following documents were enclosed for consideration at the Unicode Technical Committee held in February 2011 all of which are included in this file.

INFITT-WG02-Report-on-Grantha-Encoding-Unicode-Proposals.pdf
and
A. Appendix A: WG02 Investigation of Grantha Encoding Proposals Data Collection Summary
B. Minutes of the WG02 meeting on Grantha Unicode Proposals at EFEO, Pondicherry
C. Minutes of the WG02 meeting on Grantha Unicode Proposals at Symantec, Chennai
D. ASI South Indian Inscriptions, Vol XXIII, No. 310, Trilingual (Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu) Inscriptions, pp 400-405
E. ASI South Indian Inscriptions, Vol XXIV, No. 310, Inscriptions of the Srirangam Temple, Bilingual (Sanskrit, Kannada) Inscriptions, pp 321-322

Khamti Shan, a Tai language spoken in Kachin State, Myanmar, is a northern dialect of Shan spoken in Shan State. Shan and Khamti Shan have adapted the Myanmar (Burmese) writing system for their own use. The Khamti Shan orthography was revised in 2006, fully integrated with current literacy applications and adapting a portion of the Myanmar Unicode set of characters along with an extended set of characters specific to Shan. Khamti Shan in Myanmar differs from the Northeast India variety (Tai Khamti) by distinguishing a palatal nasal and a rhotic. Described are the Khamti Shan phoneme-grapheme correspondences, engendering the segmental, suprasegmental and syllabic features of the orthography, along with a Latin-based transliteration guide for glossing of data. A transliterated and glossed text sample is found in the appendix.

A paper on synchronic aspects of writing and standardization of single and double quotation marks is the second and final part of the study on quotation characters in the Croatian language.
Quotation marks are examined from three research perspectives: the orthographic and sociolinguistic perspective, the linguographic and computational perspective, as well as
the terminological perspective.
Of the thirty characters in five punctuation subcategories with the feature of a quotation mark in the Unicode system, fifteen of them are Latinic (8 quotation marks and 7 single quotation marks). Croatian orthographic books use six of eight quotation marks („ “ » « ” " plus two graphemes that do not exist in Unicode) and all seven single quotation marks (‚ ‛ ’ ‘ ' › ‹ plus one other non-standardized grapheme).
Two models of nomenclature for the terminological norming of all existing quotation marks are suggested (not only for signs that have been used or are still used in the Croatian language): one that is founded in a graphic, graphemic description, and one that is founded in terminological transparency.
In place of a discussion on the choice of graphemes in the Croatian linguistic norm, all relevant quotation marks and single quotation marks are evaluated by seven criteria (orthographic
tradition and continuity, frequency, transparency, legibility, typographic aesthetics, computational acceptance, and distinctiveness), and three normative models are suggested
for the Croatian graphemic standard for quotation marks.

The 'spidery kh' is one of the most puzzling characters in the Glagolitic alphabet. The paper presents evidence especially from variations of the sun symbol in the Caucasus to show its relationship to the Glagolitic glyph.
Written and put online in 2016. Official electronic publication at the University of Bamberg 2018.

Avestan’ is the name of the ritual language of Zoroastrianism, which was the state religion of the Iranian empire in Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sasanid times, covering a time span of more than 1200 years. It is named after the ‘Avesta’, i.e., the collection of holy scriptures that form the basis of the religion which was allegedly founded by Zarathushtra, also known as Zoroaster, by about the beginning of the first millennium B.C. Together with Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan represents one of the most archaic witnesses of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages, which makes it especially interesting for historical-comparative linguistics. This is why the texts of the Avesta were among the first objects of electronic corpus building that were undertaken in the framework of Indo-European studies, leading to the establishment of the TITUS database (‘Thesaurus indogermanischer Textund Sprachmaterialien’). 2 Today, the complete Avestan corpus is available, together with elaborate se...

Linguistic studies are much advanced scientific practice today. Linguistic literature is addressing global linguistic community irrespective of the paradigm, family and the size of the languages. In the midst of the most alarmed situation of language endangerment, linguistic data and other language resources are considered as one of the common goods to humanity. Therefore, preservation and presentation of language data with maximum linguistic information is  a prime concern today. Thus, standardization of transliteration, glossing  and metalanguage  which we follow are prerequisites for the smooth communication and easy access of linguistic literature at global level.  There are number of standards proposed by Lehamann (1982:199-224), Sebastian (2002), Bird Steven & Gary Simons (2003) and Haspelmath and Cormie (2008) etc. Modern linguistic studies in India are more advanced in four language families. Even though, no standard is consistently and widely following in transliteration, glossing techniques and meta-language. This problem is not at all addressed in the linguistic studies of the Dravidian family of languages. Standardisation of transliteration, glossing and meta-language standards for Dravidian languages is an imperative today. In this context, this workshop is proposed. The outcome of the workshop shall be further published through International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics (IJDL) for wider discussion.

Tamga or tamgha are emblematic symbols which were historically used by various Mongolic and Turkic tribes or clans in Central Asia. Over a hundred different Mongolian tamga are known. Certain tamga were adopted by individual medieval Mongolic and Turkic rulers, and were consequently used on coins and seals issued by these rulers. Tamga are most widely found on Islamic coins issued by the descendants of Genghis Khan in the various khanates of Central Asia during the 13th and 14th centuries, in particular the Chaghatai Khanate.

Tamga are of immense interest to numismatists, and are discussed in many academic works relating to the medieval Islamic coins of Central Asia. However, numismatists and historians currently have limited options for representing tamga symbols in text, and cannot reliably interchange text including tamga symbols because they are either represented as images, or are hand-drawn, or use an ad hoc font. We therefore propose to encode a set of tamga symbols which are attested on coin inscriptions for the benefit of numismatists and historians.

The Khitan Small Script (Chinese Qìdān xiǎozì 契丹小字) and the Khitan Large Script (Chinese Qìdān dàzì 契丹大字) are two distinct and morphologically different scripts that were both used by the Khitan people of Northern China to write the Khitan language during the Liao Dynasty (907–1125), the Kara-Khitan Khanate (1124–1218) and the Jin dynasty (1115–1234). The large script was devised in 920, under the orders of Abaoji, founder of the Liao dynasty. The small script was created a little later, in about 924 or 925 by a scholar named Yelü Diela, reportedly inspired by the Uyghur script, although the small script has no obvious similarities with the Uyghur script. Both large and small scripts have only been partially deciphered, and there are many unanswered questions related to their orthography.

This document suggests a revised list of 472 Khitan Small Script characters as candidates for encoding in ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode. This document also discusses other aspects not fully covered in the previous proposals (WG2 N3820 and N3918 submitted by China in 2010), such as the encoding model and font considerations.

This is a proposal to encode six additional Tangut ideographs. Two of these characters are attested in a recently discovered Tangut manuscript translation of a Tibetan Tantric Buddhist text written in 1258 by Drogön Chögyal Phagpa (1235–1280). The other four characters are attested in a printed Tangut collection of the writings of three generations of White Cloud Sect masters that is held at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg, Russia), pressmark Tang. 27.

The paper deals with the structural premises of diachronic corpora that are meant to
represent specimens of a given language throughout its historical stages and to provide
a diachronic cross-century retrieval. On the basis of the Georgian National Corpus
project, it discusses ways to cope with variation caused by the use of different
scripts and by language change, as well as requirements of annotating the different
layers (chronological, dialectal, sociolectal, genre-based, etc.) the text materials pertain
to, including a critique of the concepts of the ISO 639-6 standard.