Sumero-Akkadian Recognized Here
Unicode 5.0 adds scripts from ancient languages
October 15, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Fifteen years after its first publication, the Unicode standard has reached a milestone with Unicode 5.0.0, the latest version of the character encoding scheme. The new version includes 1,369 new character assignments, with three new contemporary script families and two ancient: Balinese, NKo and Phags-Pa; Phoenician and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform, respectively.
The cuneiform characters represent the effort of a multidisciplinary team based out of Johns Hopkins University, known as the Digital Hammurabi project. Much of the projects efforts and its National Science Foundation grant were devoted to hardware solutions that addressed the problems of scanning three-dimensional clay tablets, and displaying them in a format that allows users to magnify, pan, rotate and tilt the images, and generate three-dimensional models as well as two-dimensional drawings that represent the precious originals.
But software concerns also played a part: The first cuneiform e-mail was sent in 2001, and in 2004, both the Unicode Consortium and the ISO 10646 WG2 working group approved an encoding standard, which incorporated characters from Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian and Sumerian.
Unicode is important in the internationalization and localization of applications; ideally, translatable strings such as dialog boxes and menu items are separated off into resource files, while variable formatting and searching, sorting and other processing are designed to be language-independent. This internationalized application is then packaged with appropriate resource files, becoming localized versions that cost less to produce than those built by translating the entire application into other languages, one at a time.
Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium, explained, Companies tended to toss their products across the wall to some subsidiary in Japan or France or someplace, and that group would have to make sense of what all this code was. He observed that youd end up with something that was difficult to maintain because you had multiple versions of code floating around, with expensive barriers to doing business in foreign markets. Although the market for software in Phoenician or Sumerian is virtually nil, the Unicode standard includes archaic scripts in support of academic and antiquarian research.
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/29689
Most Read
Latest News
Resources
SAP unveils SAP HANA platform innovations for Big Data and spatial processing
Features include smart data access and expanded cloud deployment options
|
|
|
Alteryx raises $12 million to put Big Data analytics in the hands of all business analysts
Quest founder's firm, Toba Capital, selects Alteryx as its first analytics investment
|
|
|
Google I/O kicks off
Developers get new APIs and tools, and the Go language hits version 1.1
|
|
|
Jelastic launches new version of its Java and PHP hosting platform
Jelastic today announced the launch of a new version of its ultra-scalable cloud hosting platform
|
Telerik adds back-end services to Icenium mobile tool suite
Icenium Everlive makes the suite a complete app development platform, the company says
|
|
|
CollabNet fuses CloudForge, TeamForge
New pricing structure and integration gives developers an enterprise-grade choice for dist...
|
|
|
Eclipse release train for Kepler arrives June 26
New version of Eclipse includes Stardust for business process management, and Orion 3.0 fo...
|
|
|
Google I/O kicks off
Developers get new APIs and tools, and the Go language hits version 1.1
|
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Testing and ASQ SaaS
Demand for solutions to test applications on the cloud and for the cloud is rising signifi...
|
|
|
Get to Know the Database Decision Factors
What should you look for when choosing a relational database system? This informative arti...
|
|
|
Exploring the Database Forest
Today’s database technology landscape is more dynamic and varied than ever before. What’s...
|
|
|
Data Management Resource Guide
Today’s data is generated by more than just applications. Data is generated by trillions o...
|