Michael Everson in Isfahan

Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media. Photo of Michael Everson taken by Elnaz Sarbar in November 2004 in Esfahan, Iran. ... Photo of Michael Everson taken by Elnaz Sarbar in November 2004 in Esfahan, Iran. ... Naghsh-i Jahan Square, Isfahan This article is about the city of Isfahan. ... is the 9th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... For other uses, see 1963 (disambiguation). ... For the journal, see Linguistics (journal). ... A character encoding or character set (sometimes referred to as code page) consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... ... Writing systems of the world today. ... This article is about the machine. ...

He has been described as "probably the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts"^[1] for his work to add a wide variety of scripts and characters to the Universal Character Set. Since 1993, he has written over two hundred proposals^[2] which have added thousands of characters to ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard. A writing system, also called a script, is used to visually record a language with symbols. ... The international standard ISO/IEC 10646 defines the Universal Character Set (UCS) as a character encoding. ... The Universal Character Set is a character encoding that is defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ...

Life

Everson was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Tucson, Arizona at the age of 12. His interest in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien led him to study Old English and then other Germanic languages. He read German, Spanish, and French for his B.A. at the University of Arizona (1985), and the History of Religions and Indo-European linguistics for his M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (1988). In 1989, his former professor Marija Gimbutas asked him to read a paper on Basque mythology at an Indo-Europeanist Conference held in Ireland; shortly thereafter he moved to Dublin, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar in the Faculty of Celtic Studies, University College Dublin (1991). He was naturalized as an Irish citizen in 2000. He currently lives in Lecanvey, west of Westport, County Mayo. He is a Buddhist. Norristown is a home rule municipality in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, 6 miles (10 km) northwest of the city limits of Philadelphia, on the Schuylkill River. ... This article is about the U.S. State. ... Tucson (pronounced ) is the seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States, located 118 miles (188 km) southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles (98 km) north of the U.S.-Mexico border. ... Official language(s) English Spoken language(s) English 74. ... J. R. R. Tolkien in 1916. ... Old English redirects here. ... The Germanic languages are a group of related languages constituting a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. ... The University of Arizona (UA or U of A) is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics, dealing with the Indo-European languages. ... The University of California, Los Angeles (generally known as UCLA) is a public research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. ... Marija Gimbutas by Kerbstone 52, at the back of Newgrange, Co. ... Ancient Basque mythology is centered around the figure of the goddess Mari, and her consort Sugaar (also called Maju). ... Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics, dealing with the Indo-European languages. ... For other uses, see Dublin (disambiguation). ... The Fulbright Program is program of educational grants (Fulbright Fellowships) sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State. ... Celtic Studies is the academic discipline occupied with the study of any sort of cultural output relating to a Celtic people. ... University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin - more commonly University College Dublin (UCD) - is Irelands largest university, with over 20,000 students. ... A judge swears in a new citizen. ... Lecanvey (Leac an Anfa in Irish) is a seaside village in County Mayo between Westport and Louisburgh, about 2km west of Murrisk. ... WGS-84 (GPS) Coordinates: , Irish Grid Reference M004841 Statistics Province: Connacht County: Elevation: 80 m Population (2006)  - Town:  - Rural:   5,140  1,458 Westport (Irish: , meaning City of the Beeves) is a town in County Mayo in the Republic of Ireland. ... Statistics Province: Connacht County Town: Castlebar Code: MO Area: 5,397 km² Population (2006) 123,648 Website: www. ... A statue of the Sakyamuni Buddha in Tawang Gompa, India. ...

Work

Everson is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields of character encoding standardization and internationalization. In addition to being one of the primary contributing editors of the Unicode Standard, he is also a contributing editor to ISO/IEC 10646, registrar for ISO 15924^[3], and subtag reviewer for BCP 47. He has contributed to the encoding of many scripts and characters in those standards, receiving the Unicode "Bulldog" Award in 2000^[4] for his technical contributions to the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard. In 2004, Everson was appointed convenor of ISO TC46/WG3 (Conversion of Written Languages), which is responsible for transliteration standards. A character encoding or character set (sometimes referred to as code page) consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers... “Standard” redirects here. ... Internationalization and localization are means of adapting products such as publications or software for non-native environments, especially other nations and cultures. ... The Universal Character Set is a character encoding that is defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646. ... ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems (scripts). ... Alternate meaning: Wikipedia:Requests for comment A Request for Comments (RFC) document is one of a series of numbered Internet informational documents and standards very widely followed by both commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. ... “ISO” redirects here. ... Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. ...

Everson has been actively involved in the encoding of many scripts in the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards, including Avestan, Balinese, Bamum, Braille, Buginese, Buhid, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Carian, Cherokee, Coptic, Cuneiform, Cypriot, Deseret, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ethiopic, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gothic, Hanunóo, Kayah Li, Khmer, Lepcha, Limbu, Linear B, Lycian, Lydian, Meitei Mayek, Mongolian, Myanmar, New Tai Lue, N'Ko, Ogham, Ol Chiki, Old Italic, Old Persian, Osmanya, Phaistos Disc, Phoenician, Rejang, Runic, Saurashtra, Shavian, Sinhala, Sundanese, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Thaana, Tibetan, Ugaritic, Vai, and Yi, as well as many characters belonging to the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts. The Avestan alphabet was created in the 3rd century AD for writing the hymns of Zarathustra (a. ... The Balinese alphabet is a type of alphabet called an abugida that was used to write the Balinese language, an Austronesian language spoken by about three million people on the Indonesian island of Bali. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... Braille code where the word (, French for first) can be read. ... This article is about ethnic groups of South Sulawesi. ... An indigenous Brahmic script of the Philippines. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... The Carian language was the language of the Carians. ... Sequoyah The Cherokee language is written in a syllabary invented by Sequoyah (also known as George Gist or George Guess). ... The Coptic alphabet is an alphabet used for writing the Coptic language. ... Cuneiform redirects here. ... The Deseret alphabet is a phonetic alphabet developed in the mid-19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret (later the University of Utah) under the direction of Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ... A section of the Papyrus of Ani showing cursive hieroglyphs. ... The Geez language (or Giiz language) is an ancient language that developed in the Ethiopian Highlands of the Horn of Africa as the language of the peasantry. ... The Glagolitic alphabet or Glagolitsa is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. ...   The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by Philostorgius to Wulfila, used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. ... One of the indigenous scripts of the Philippines; see Baybayin. ...   The Kayah Li script is used to write the Kayah languages Eastern Kayah Li and Western Kayah Li, which are members of Karenic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. ... The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog translated into Khmer. ...   Lepcha script is used by the Lepcha people. ... The Limbu alphabet is a Brahmic script used to write the Limbu language of northern India and Nepal. ... This article is about the ancient syllabary. ... Lycian script was used to write the Lycian language. ... more Lydian was on Indo-European language spoken in the region of Lydia in western Anatolia (present-day Turkey). ...   Sample of Meitei Mayek script, showing the main consonants in the alphabet Meitei Mayek script (also Meithei Mayek, Meetei Mayek, Manipuri script) (Manipuri: Meetei Mayek) is a syllabic script used for the Meitei language (Manipuri), one of the official languages of the Indian state of Manipur. ...   New Tai Lue is an alphabet used for the Tai Lü language. ... The word NKo written in the NKo alphabet NKo is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language itself written in the script. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... The Ol Chiki script, also known as Ol Cemet (language of writing), Ol Ciki, Ol (and sometimes as the Santali alphabet, was created in 1925 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... See Aryan Language or Old Persian For more information visit: *[Ancient Iranian Languages & Literature The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies (CAIS) ...   The Osmanya alphabet is a script for the Somali language invented between 1920 and 1922 by the Sultan of Obbias brother, Cismaan Yuusuf Keenadiid. ... The Phaistos Disc (Phaistos Disk, Phaestos Disc) is a curious archaeological find, likely dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age. ... The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to begin with a cut-off date of 1050 BCE. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. ... The Rejang script, sometimes spelt Redjang and locally known as Aksara Kaganga (Ka Ga Nga alphabet) after its first three letters, is an abugida of the Brahmic family, and is related to other scripts of the region, like Batak, Buginese, and Kerinci. ... Rune redirects here. ... Saurashtra, more correctly, Sauraṣṭri or Sauraṣṭram or Sourashtra, also known as Palkar, Sowrashtra, Saurashtram, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in parts of the Southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... The Sinhala script is used to write the Sinhala language. ... Sundanese (Basa Sunda, literally language of Sunda) is the language of about 27 million people from the western third of Java or about 15% of the Indonesian population. ... Baybayin (sometimes called Alibata) is a pre-Hispanic Tagalog writing system that originated from the Javanese script Kavi. ... Tagbawna is one of the indigenous writing systems of the Philippines. ...   Tai Le is a script used for the Tai Nüa language. ... Thaana (written ‎ in Thaana) is the writing system for the Dhivehi language spoken in the Maldives. ... The Tibetan script was created in the mid-7th century, by Thonmi Sambhota, a Tibetan official, with the assistance of some Indian Buddhist monks. ... The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad, used from around 1300 BC for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Canaanite language discovered in Ugarit, Syria. ...   The Vai script was devised by of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. ... The Yi scripts, also known as Cuan or Wei, are used to write the Yi languages. ... Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz redirects here. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by certain Slavic languages — Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and others. ...

Together with John Cowan, he is also responsible for the ConScript Unicode Registry, a project to coordinate the mapping of artificial scripts into the Unicode Private Use Area. Among the scripts "encoded" in the CSUR, Shavian and Deseret were eventually formally adopted into Unicode; two other conscripts under consideration are Tolkien's scripts of Tengwar and Cirth. The ConScript Unicode Registry is a volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Area for the encoding of artificial scripts. ... An artificial or constructed script (also conscript or neography) is a new writing system specifically created by an individual or group, rather than having evolved as part of a language or culture like a natural script. ... Unicode reserves 1,114,112 (= 220 + 216) code points, and currently assigns characters to more than 96,000 of those code points. ... Posthumously funded by and named for Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, the Shavian alphabet (also known as Shaw alphabet) was conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. ... The Deseret alphabet is a phonetic alphabet developed in the mid-19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret (later the University of Utah) under the direction of Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ... First article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (in English) Tengwar is an artificial script which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. ...   This chart showing the runes shared by the Angerthas Daeron and Angerthas Moria is presented in Appendix E of The Return of the King. ...

Everson has also created locale and language information for many languages, from support for the Irish language and the other Celtic languages to the minority languages of Finland^[5]. In 2000, together with Trond Trosterud, he co-authored Software localization into Nynorsk Norwegian, a report commissioned by the Norwegian Language Council. In 2003 he was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme to prepare a report^[6] on the computer locale requirements for the major languages of Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari, and Uzbek), co-authored by Roozbeh Pournader, which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration^[7]. More recently, UNESCO's Initiative B@bel^[8] funded Everson's work to encode the N'Ko and Balinese scripts^[9]. This article is about the modern Goidelic language. ... The Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. ... A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a country. ... Norsk språkråd (The Norwegian Language Council) is the Norwegian governments advisory body in matters pertaining to the Norwegian language and language planning. ... The United Nations Development Programe (UNDP), the United Nations global development network, is the largest multilateral source of development assistance in the world. ... Pashto (‎, IPA: also known as Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto ‎, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu or Pushtoo) is a language spoken by Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. ... The term Dari derives from Fârsi-e Darbâri which means Persian of the (royal) courts. It developed at the royal courts of the Samanids (980 AD) in Central Asia and became the major language of Persia. ... In recent years the politics of Afghanistan have been dominated by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and the subsequent efforts to stabilise and democratise the country. ... UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a specialized agency of the United Nations established in 1945. ... The word NKo written in the NKo alphabet NKo is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language itself written in the script. ... The Balinese alphabet is a type of alphabet called an abugida that was used to write the Balinese language, an Austronesian language spoken by about three million people on the Indonesian island of Bali. ...

He also has a particular interest in Gaelic typeface design, and does a considerable amount of work typesetting books in Irish ^[10]. In 1995 he designed the Unicode font, Everson Mono, a monospaced typeface with more than 4,800 characters. This font was the third Unicode-encoded font to contain a large number of characters from many character blocks, after Lucida Sans Unicode and Unihan font (both 1993). “Font” redirects here. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Unicode fonts (also known as UCS fonts, Unicode Typefaces and Typefaces) contains wide range of characters, letters, digits, glyphs, symbols, etc, which are collectively mapped into Universal Character Set, also known as, UCS (which is an international standard ISO/IEC 10646), derived from many different languages from all around the... Everson Mono is a monospaced transitional sans serif Unicode font whose development by Michael Everson began in 1995. ... columns of characters must be consistently aligned. ... “Font” redirects here. ... In digital typography, 's Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font is designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 2. ... Unihan font was developed by Ross Paterson in 1993. ...

In 2007 he co-authored a proposal for a new standard written form of Cornish, called Kernowak.^[11] For the Cornish-English dialect, see West Country dialects. ...

References

The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 268th day of the year (269th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 205th day of the year (206th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 27th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... For the band, see 1997 (band). ... is the 73rd day of the year (74th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 210th day of the year (211th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a specialized agency of the United Nations established in 1945. ... Year 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 316th day of the year (317th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... For other uses, see 5th October (Serbia). ...

External links

• Evertype.com, Michael Everson's web site
• Evertype, Michael Everson's weblog
• An interview with Michael Everson by Dick Gordon on The Connection, a National Public Radio public affairs call-in program
• The Unicode Consortium