Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!yfcw14 From: yfcw14@castle.ed.ac.uk (K P Donnelly) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: Polyglot List Issue Message-ID: <7828@castle.ed.ac.uk> Date: 15 Jan 91 10:58:34 GMT References: <6600@alpha.cam.nist.gov> Organization: Edinburgh University Computer Services Lines: 24 >> 6) Latin-1 does indeed cover all of Western Europe, but does <> >> cover Greek, and therefore does not cover all the EEC. >Latin-1 (ISO 8859/1) does NOT cover "lappish", which is a minority language >used by the Lapps in Norway, Sweden and Finland. As the Nordic countries >are usually considered part of Western Europe, Latin-1 does not cover all >of Western Europe. >Lappish is covered by Latin-4 (ISO 8859/4). Latin-1 does not cover Welsh, which has something like 300 thousand or 400 thousand speakers. Wales is both in the EEC and in Western Europe. In fact Welsh is not covered by *any* of the parts of ISO 8859. The problem is that Welsh has accents not only on the vowels a e i o u but also on the semivowels w and y, and some of them are important. Welsh is included in the mechanism of ISO 6937, which is based on Teletext, allowed in X.400 headers, and which uses non-spacing "floating" accents to code accented characters in two bytes (often making processing difficult). However, a proposal to ammend the ISO 6937 *repertoire* to include Welsh was recently voted down. Kevin Donnelly