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Re: Meaning of multilingual

1993-03-01 18:09:49
There are many possible meanings of "multilingual".  Sloppy usage of
the term is leading to many silly accusations.  Most codesets are
"few" lingual, e.g. even ASCII supports English and pig-latin.  I tend
to call this "accidental multilingualism" since they may not have even
been envisaged by the designer of the codeset.  Some codesets, e.g.
EUC, are designed to support a specific set of languages.  Again these
are "few" lingual.  ISO 10646 is designed to be what I will call "full
multilingualism".  That is it supports "all" language or scripts (with
the exceptions of some rare or little used ones which have not be
standardized enough to include yet.)

You misunderstand EUC. EUC supports "all" languages or scripts (with the
exceptions).

While EUC can't encode too many languages at once, ISO 10646 can't
either.

Generic ISO 2022 and compound text of X11 are the examples of full
multilingual codesets.

                                                Masataka Ohta

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