(iso639.1574) New ISO 639 language identifier - Klingon

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Wed Feb 25 17:56:34 CET 2004


> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Tex Texin


> ugh. Is anyone bothered by the fact that we will now have a registered
> identifier for a language that we have decided not to encode in
Unicode? We can
> represent it transliterated but not its "native" script. If Klingon is
> transliterated into more than one script, it will be difficult to do
searches
> etc. (Ah, I feel a spec for Klingon Normalization forms coming on...)

I don't think there's any serious problem here. Keep in mind that
Unicode does not encode languages, it encodes scripts. And what was not
encoded in Unicode was Klingon script precisely because the script that
*is* used by the Klingon user community out there is Latin. Nobody
really *wants* to represent it in its "native" script.

There was an absence of a user community for Klingon script, but that is
a separate issue from there being a user community for the Klingon
language.



Peter
 
Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division


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