Re: character sets (was: ConGermanicRomanceLang?)

Raymond Brown wrote:

>> Because the U.S./Western European Windows character set, CP1252, is an
>> upward compatible extension of the ISO character set 8859-1 (Latin-1),
>> and therefore handles the official languages of Western European
>> countries, including Iceland.  (It doesn't handle Welsh, though.)
>
> Even tho Welsh has had official status as a national language for some time
> now?
Probably not when 8859-1 was devised.  In any case, Welsh is
not an official language of the U.K., only of Wales, if I
understand correctly.  8859-14 (aka Latin-8) handles all
the Celtic languages, and is compatible with 8859-1 as
far as letters are concerned (the accented w's and y's, and
the dotted b, c, d, f, g, m, p, and s are squeezed in as
replacements for most non-ASCII symbol characters).


>> Apple, OTOH, didn't bother to make MacRoman handle Icelandic, and had
>> to devise a separate character set, MacIcelandic, to do so.
>
>
> Ah, like Micro$oft didn't bother to make _Western_ European Windows handle
> Welsh?  (And if you west from Wales you fall straight into the sea  :)
Microsoft extended an international standard.  Apple invented
its own standard.

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