ISO-IR 169, ISO/IEC 2022, ISO 10646 (UCS) and Unicode

Hi all,

Further to the discussion today of ISO-IR 169, the 1993 standardized 
encoding of 2300+ Blissymbols in a lexicon fashion - i.e. one code point 
per Bliss word vs one code point per Bliss character - I think I have 
determined its current status.

ISO-IR 169 was part of ISO/IEC 2022 which was last updated in 1994. 
ISO/IEC 2022 is a standard that uses control characters to switch 
between different code pages in a similar way to the ISO/IEC 8859 series 
of standards. It is no longer supported by most major operating systems. 
ISO/IEC 2022 was incorporated into ISO 10646 (the Universal Character 
Set) which is the ISO equivalent standard to Unicode. So, you would 
think that ISO-IR 169 is thus incorporated into ISO 10646 and thus 
Unicode...but alas, this is apparently not the case. It appears that 
when ISO/IEC 2022 transitioned to ISO 10646, it was done in a "curated" 
fashion and some less mainstream parts were left out, including ISO-IR 169.

ChatGPT comes to this conclusion after some prodding, and this seems to 
jive with what I can dig up regarding the paths of these standards to 
the current Unicode-centric situation.

The good news is...  😂

The coverage of the 800 entries of Ogdens Basic English by ISO-IR 169 is 
603 (vs 368 for the current Bliss Unicode proposal single code point 
characters). These numbers are estimates due to there likely being a few 
synonym mismatches but it gives a rough estimate.

Using a different offset, ISO-IR 169 could be moved to the private use 
area and provide the basis for the registry...which in fact is exactly 
equivalent to the current first 2300+ Bliss characters in the registry 
since they are exactly equivalent to ISO-IR 169! (BCI-IDs are actually 
an integer representation of the ISO-IR 169 code points) The other 4000 
or so Blissymbols in the registry thus represent a natural extension to 
ISO-IR 169 and I'm sure will fill in a good number of the remaining 
slots in Ogden's 800. Perhaps I will quantify that in a day or two.

Cheers,

Russell

Received on Wednesday, 23 April 2025 01:11:49 UTC