Hunzakuts Rejoice!

The Unicoders are looking out for you. You even got first mention in “Other Changes,” and all sorts of excitement around your BAREE YEH. (I had to emulate the caps thing, but YEH BAREE is just too weird, even for me.)

Of more general interest (if you can call it that:)

Chapter 8: Middle Eastern Scripts
Arabic

A number of Arabic character were added in Version 5.1 in support of minority languages, four Quranic Arabic characters were added, and the Arabic math repertoire was greatly extended. Sixteen characters were added in support of the Khowar, Torwali, and Burushaski languages spoken primarily in Pakistan, and a set of eight Arabic characters were added in support of Persian and Azerbaijani. The 27 newly added Arabic math characters include arrows, mathematical operators and letterlike symbols.

Chapter 9: South Asian Scripts-I
Indic

A number of useful characters were added to Indic scripts. The Devanagari candra-a, Gurmukhi udaat and yakash, and additional Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu characters were added. These new characters expand the support of Sanskrit in those scripts, further the support of minority languages, and encode old fraction and number systems.

Burushaski speakers celebrating the release of v. 5.1.0 of the Unicode Standard.

(There are some amazing pictures in this CC-licensed photo set by Janice Lane. Some of them would have made for much better jokes, but it’s not nice to make fun of people. And I really wanted to use this incredible photo, but I try to be a copyright goody-two-shoes, and I’m too lazy to write. And seriously, Hunza is a beautiful place, and if anyone wants to teach me Burushaski, I’m ready. And thanks to Unicode we’ll be able to do it over email or IM.)

NYT on Pakistan’s Gülen schools

Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam – New York Times
Sabrina Tavernise is following in the grand tradition of NYT bureau chiefs reporting on Pakistan from the comfort of their home base in anywhere-but-Pakistan. In this case she at least had someone (Sebnem Arsu) who apparently spent some time in the country send her a quote or two rather than just regurgitating what the English press had to say. In this case, both the reporting and the analysis were uniquely shabby.

Odd encoding convergence

In December 2007, Unicode (UTF-8 specifically, according to the chart), US ASCII, and Western European encodings all converged in popularity, with each claiming about a quarter of the web. About half of the remaining quarter was in Chinese and Japanese encodings, with the last eighth unspecified. The Western European encodings appear to be gently fading away from a peak in 2006, and ASCII continues on a precipitous descent from the days of the ASCII-only web (and everything else.) Unicode is chugging away, roughly doubling its share every year.

Source: Official Google Blog: Moving to Unicode 5.1