[sword-devel] BPBible 0.3

[Chris Little]

DM Smith wrote:
> On Jun 7, 2008, at 12:05 AM, jonathon wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 8:34 PM, DM Smith wrote:
>>
>>> (Such as ISO-639 for languages). I'm not sure that even if such a  
>>> notion existed whether we could make it understandable to users.)
>> What about using ISO 15924?
>> http://unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15924
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_15924_codes
> 
> Very interesting. Thanks.
> 
> Thinking out loud: I am wondering how complete it is? For example,  
> ISO639 was relatively incomplete a few years back, but now that SIL  
> has taken over management of it, it is complete (or nearly so).  
> Specifically, is there sufficient scripts to cover all the ISO639  
> languages? For example, Burmese is not part of Unicode yet (SIL  
> translators are working on getting it in). Which script would it use?

ISO 15924 was basically written by Michael Everson, who remains its 
Registrar. He's the same person who writes or collaborates on a majority 
of Unicode script proposals (or a plurality of them at least). So if 
there's a script in Unicode, it's probably already in ISO 15924.

Burmese has been in Unicode since at least 3.0. It's the Myanmar script, 
ISO code Mymr. There are some documents in the Unicode document register 
regarding new codepoints being added to Myanmar, but the script is 
already well established. (An amusing article on Burma vs. Myanmar: 
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=220)

There are a number of ISO codes for scripts that will never be encoded 
in Unicode, at least not separately. And those scripts that have no code 
also can't be encoded in Unicode presently.

--Chris