Unicode 6

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Marth, I’m chuffed.

You are?

Yes.

Are you chuffed to the mint balls?

I am indeed. Unicode 6 has come out.

I know I can’t silence.

Unicode 6 is like a map for all the ways that you can write human language.

Oh, well, I’m sort of chuffed, I guess. Tell me more.

Imagine this. You’re studying, say, Mayan, right?

Yeah.

And you’re doing it on a computer.

You don’t want to handwrite all those little characters, right?

You need a typeface on your computer that will do that.

Well, Unicode 6 is the map for that.

You can punch in some keys and it will type Mayan on your computer, which is like a time warp happening on your desktop.

It’s crazy.

And Unicode 6 has added a lot more stuff, a lot more languages.

For my work as a dictionary editor, they also have the International Phonetic Alphabet that’s been apart for a long time.

But they’ve added things like the Japanese equivalent of emoticons.

Emoji? Do you know these?

No.

The little faces that you make out of punctuation?

No.

Just like we would with, you know.

In Japanese?

Yeah, yeah.

So those are now a part of Unicode.

But let’s just put it the way.

What it is, it’s bringing order to all the mess that are human scripts for language.

Right?

If you want to be able to work in all these scripts, if you want to type in a language that works from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew.

Somebody does.

Yeah.

If you want to make complex characters in Japanese or Chinese that require you overlay or intermesh two different characters to create a final one, right?

You need a very sophisticated roadmap to do that.

And Unicode 6 is the latest version of that map.

Who’s making the map?

Is there a…

It’s a consortium called the Unicode Consortium.

It’s got partners like Microsoft and Apple.

And all of these companies get together because they realize that all these other systems weren’t interoperable.

You know, imagine that you had to have a special kind of gasoline for each car, right?

Or imagine the prongs in your house weren’t pretty standardized as they are, right?

You basically have two different kinds of prongs now, right?

Unicode 6 is that standardization for representing TypeScripts on a computer.

It’s great.

So if I want to type in Hindi or Mayan?

Yeah, any language, including many dead languages.

Really?

Yeah, like linear A.

I’m serious.

I’m not even kidding.

These languages that we may not even fully have translated have characters.

I mean, we’re talking tens of thousands of characters are mapped in Unicode 6.

It’s wonderful.

If you want to find out more about Unicode 6, we’ll link to it and include some of the images from the update.

Call us 1-877-929-9673 or send those emails in Unicode to words@waywordradio.org.