Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!mcsun!hafro!isgate!krafla!magnus
From: magnus@rhi.hi.is (Magnus Gislason)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <1368@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Date: 22 Nov 89 13:07:40 GMT
References: <472@enea.se> <1073@mountn.dec.com> <1084@mountn.dec.com>
Organization: University of Iceland
Lines: 32

minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow) writes:

>ISO Latin-1 is almost identical to Multinational.  The "blank spots"
>in Multinational were filled in, and one or two character were changed,
>possibly so Dec wouldn't have a competitive advantage.  We released

I think the reason why ISO did not just adopt DEC Multinational as Latin-1
is because Multinational does not include all Icelandic national characters
(Iceland is a part of Western Europe).  There wasn't room for all of them
in the "blank spots" in the upper quarter of Multinational (C0-FF).  When
DEC came up with Multinational we couldn't use it here in Iceland, so DEC
made an Icelandic version of Multinational, and of course they couldn't
put the missing Icelandic characters in the same places as in ISO Latin-1.

>  D0	add Icelandic capital D-
>  D7	remove OE, add multiplication sign
>  DD	remove Y-dieresis, add Y with acute accent
>  DE	add Icelandic capital Thorn (looks like Greek theta)
                                     ^^^^^
This should be "sounds", they look different.

>  F0	add Icelandic lower-case d-
>  F7	remove oe, add division sign
>  FD	remove y-dieresis, add y with acute accent
>  FE	add Icelandic lower-case thorn
>  FF	add y-dieresis (exists in lower-case only)

As you can see from this list the changes are mainly concerning the
Icelandic characters D-, Thorn and Y with acute accent (the Y-acute is
not used in any other Western European language, as far as I know).

	Magnus