Re: Characters on the list (was: deep flutes)
From: | John Cowan <jcowan@...> |
Date: | Thursday, February 10, 2000, 22:17 |
"Daniel A. Wier" wrote:
> Still, it's a more practical code in
> the global sense, since over 60 million people speak Turkish and only a few
> hundred thousand speak Icelandic or Faroese.
The original design of ISO 8859 was regional: 8859-1 in the West,
8859-2 in the East, 8859-3 in the South, 8859-4 in the North of Europe.
Turkish was (and is) coverable with 8859-3, along with Maltese and
Esperanto. But Turkish users didn't like being massively incompatible
with 8859-1, which became the de facto standard for all Latin-based
systems, and so they proposed 8859-9, which was simply a modified
version of 8859-1 with Turkish letters substituted for Icelandic,
as Danny has outlined.
More recent parts of 8859 have basically used the same principle:
as compatible as possible with 8859-1, with the locally needed
letters replacing the rarely used non-letter characters.
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