Henry Luce Foundation Grant to the Unicode Consortium

The Henry Luce Foundation has made a grant to the Unicode Consortium in support of three meetings between Unicode specialists, experts, and user communities in Mongolia and China. The meetings, which will take place from 2015 to 2017, will discuss encoding issues relating to specific scripts in the region, such as Mongolian Square and Soyombo. The goal of the meetings is to move the scripts forward in the encoding process, so scholars and the relevant user communities will eventually be able to create, send, and search materials in these scripts electronically. The project is headed by Dr. Deborah Anderson, Technical Director of the Consortium, and Project Leader of the UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative.

For information about previous grant support by the Henry Luce Foundation to the Unicode Consortium, see Foundation Grants.

Unicode Version 8.0 - Complete Text of the Core Specification Published

The core specification for Version 8.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available, containing significant updates and improvements:

• A rewritten description of casing to account for the addition of a set of lowercase Cherokee syllables
• A substantial revision to the documentation on emoji symbols, including descriptions of the new symbol modifiers for implementing skin tone diversity
• An update to New Tai Lue to describe the change of model from logical to visual
• Descriptions for five new scripts and Sutton SignWriting
• Improvements to existing script descriptions, including Bengali, Devanagari, Malayalam, and to the description of tag characters.

In Version 8.0, the standard grew by 7,716 characters. This version continues the Unicode Consortium’s long-standing commitment to support the full diversity of languages around the world by adding new scripts and other characters that support additional languages of Africa and India, such as Ik, Kulango, and Tai Ahom. The text of the latest version also documents the newly adopted Georgian lari currency symbol.

All other components of Unicode 8.0 were released on June 17, 2015 to allow vendors to update their implementations of Unicode 8.0 as early as possible. These components include the Unicode Standard Annexes, code charts, and the Unicode Character Database. The publication of the core specification completes the definitive documentation of the Unicode Standard, Version 8.0. A print-on-demand (POD) version for Unicode 8.0 is planned for later publication.

For more information, see Unicode 8.0.0.

Keynote Speaker Announced for IUC 39

Babel Rousers: The 900 Year Quest to Build a Better Language

Arika Okrent
Linguist and Author

After a Monday full of tutorials for new attendees and those requiring a refresher, join us Tuesday morning for a keynote presentation by Arika Okrent, linguist and author of In the Land of Invented Languages. Arika will be illustrating the history of approaches to language invention, both ingenious and foolhardy, by looking at particular words from these languages.

About IUC 39, October 26-28, 2015: The Internationalization and Unicode® Conference (IUC) is the premier event covering the latest in industry standards and best practices for bringing software and Web applications to worldwide markets. This annual event focuses on software and Web globalization, bringing together internationalization experts, tools vendors, software implementers, and business and program managers from around the world. Read more.