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Sumero-Akkadian Recognized Here


Unicode 5.0 adds scripts from ancient languages

By P J Connolly


 P J Connolly
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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, N’Ko 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 project’s 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 “you’d 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.




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