Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Tue, 11 Feb 92 22:36 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA20285; Tue, 11 Feb 92 18:05:41 EST Received: from cunixf.cc.columbia.edu by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA23249; Tue, 11 Feb 92 15:55:36 -0500 Received: from cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu by cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (5.59/FCB) id AA30302; Tue, 11 Feb 92 15:55:36 EST Message-Id: <9202112055.AA30302@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.1) with BSMTP id 2866; Tue, 11 Feb 92 15:54:08 EST Received: by CUVMB (Mailer R2.07) id 7771; Tue, 11 Feb 92 15:52:30 EST Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1992 15:51:28 EST Reply-To: Guy Steele Sender: Lojban list From: Guy Steele Subject: Unofficial alphabet lists for Lojban/Latin/English, Greek, and Russian X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: "Dean C. Gahlon"'s message of Tue, 11 Feb 1992 14:35:13 CST <9202112038.AA05130@Early-Bird.Think.COM> Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Tue Feb 11 22:36:46 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN If you guys are going to get serious about providing names for every character in the world, you might avoid duplication of effort by studying the various ISO standards for national and international character sets in a systematic manner rather than taking a hodgepodge approach. There is also a fairly recent proposal called Unicode, which attempts to provide a single 16-bit computer code that covers all the world's alphabets. You can buy a copy of the draft proposal in the form of a book (about 2 inches thick) from Addison-Wesley. Yes, it covers Devanagari, Japanese kana, and han (Chinese characters, known as kanji to the Japanese), Bopomofo, Turkish, Russian, Greek, Zapf Dingbats, ... I believe there are only a few tens of thousands of characters (plenty of room for expansion). --Guy Steele