Origin of the digital encoding of accented characters for Esperanto

[Ken Whistler]

For ISO 8859-3, the answer is in the wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-3

"It was designed to cover Turkish, Maltese and Esperanto, ..."

The answer for IBM CP905 is simple -- it is simply the EBCDIC
code page of June, 1986 that corresponded to ISO 8859-3.
That also covers the answer for ISO-IR 109, which is simply
the registration of the right-hand part of Latin-3.

At any rate, since I didn't check first whether the Esperanto
letters were in ISO 8859-3 before I wrote my initial response,
this would certainly remove all proximate speculation about
the occurrence of the accented letters for Esperanto in
the Unicode 1.0 repertoire in Latin Extended-A. They were
included by the exercise of doing the union of all the
8859 Latin alphabets.

So the answer for Unicode is, instead, *yes*, they were in
a pre-existing standard that was grandfathered in to the
initial collection of accented Latin letters.

And the question, instead, then becomes tracking down through
the ancient history of JTC1/SC2/WG3 (<-- Note *3*, not *2*),
why the participants who drafted 8859-3 felt it was important
to include the Esperanto letters in the repertoire for the South
European set back in 1986. That date, by the way, is earlier than
anything I have firsthand records for.

--Ken


On 3/23/2015 10:10 AM, Leo Broukhis wrote:
>
> How come this character is in ISO-8859-3? IBM905?
>
> Leo
>
>