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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. -- Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@...> Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)