The Khitan small script ( Chinese : 契丹小字 ; pinyin : qìdān xiǎozì ) was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language . It was used during the 10th–12th century by the Khitan people , who had created the Liao Empire in present-day northeastern China. In addition to the small script, the Khitans simultaneously also used a functionally independent writing system known as the Khitan large script . Both Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the Jurchens for several decades after the fall of the Liao dynasty, until the Jurchens fully switched to a script of their own . Examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments , although other fragments sometimes surface.
48-574: The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela . He drew his inspiration from "the Uyghur language and script", which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was originally thought to be a daughter script of the Old Uyghur alphabet . Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script
96-411: A Chinese loanword in a Khitan inscription; otherwise, such phonetic values are hard to determine, as very little of the Khitan language is known.) Small script uses a mixture of logograms, syllabograms, and, as some as sources claim, a few single sound phonograms . Sometimes suffixes were written with syllabograms, just as single syllables sometimes were written with three syllabograms (with one each for
144-429: A Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant pair as well. Each block could incorporate two to seven such "phonetic element" characters, written in pairs within the block, with the first half of the pair on the left. If there were an odd number of characters in a block, the unpaired character would be centered below the preceding pair. Although there
192-498: A block is always a multiple of 16, and is often a multiple of 128, but is otherwise arbitrary. Characters required for a given script may be spread out over several different, potentially disjunct blocks within the codespace. Each code point is assigned a classification, listed as the code point's General Category property. Here, at the uppermost level code points are categorized as one of Letter, Mark, Number, Punctuation, Symbol, Separator, or Other. Under each category, each code point
240-727: A calendar year and with rare cases where the scheduled release had to be postponed. For instance, in April 2020, a month after version 13.0 was published, the Unicode Consortium announced they had changed the intended release date for version 14.0, pushing it back six months to September 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Unicode 16.0, the latest version, was released on 10 September 2024. It added 5,185 characters and seven new scripts: Garay , Gurung Khema , Kirat Rai , Ol Onal , Sunuwar , Todhri , and Tulu-Tigalari . Thus far,
288-432: A comprehensive catalog of character properties, including those needed for supporting bidirectional text , as well as visual charts and reference data sets to aid implementers. Previously, The Unicode Standard was sold as a print volume containing the complete core specification, standard annexes, and code charts. However, version 5.0, published in 2006, was the last version printed this way. Starting with version 5.2, only
336-575: A full semantic duplicate of the Latin alphabet, because legacy CJK encodings contained both "fullwidth" (matching the width of CJK characters) and "halfwidth" (matching ordinary Latin script) characters. The Unicode Bulldog Award is given to people deemed to be influential in Unicode's development, with recipients including Tatsuo Kobayashi , Thomas Milo, Roozbeh Pournader , Ken Lunde , and Michael Everson . The origins of Unicode can be traced back to
384-429: A handful of scripts—often primarily between a given script and Latin characters —not between a large number of scripts, and not with all of the scripts supported being treated in a consistent manner. The philosophy that underpins Unicode seeks to encode the underlying characters— graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than graphical distinctions considered mere variant glyphs thereof, that are instead best handled by
432-534: A low-surrogate code point forms a surrogate pair in UTF-16 in order to represent code points greater than U+FFFF . In principle, these code points cannot otherwise be used, though in practice this rule is often ignored, especially when not using UTF-16. A small set of code points are guaranteed never to be assigned to characters, although third-parties may make independent use of them at their discretion. There are 66 of these noncharacters : U+FDD0 – U+FDEF and
480-535: A project run by Deborah Anderson at the University of California, Berkeley was founded in 2002 with the goal of funding proposals for scripts not yet encoded in the standard. The project has become a major source of proposed additions to the standard in recent years. The Unicode Consortium together with the ISO have developed a shared repertoire following the initial publication of The Unicode Standard : Unicode and
528-399: A properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose. This design decision was made based on the assumption that only scripts and characters in "modern" use would require encoding: Unicode gives higher priority to ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities. Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in
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#1732776280197576-558: A total of 168 scripts are included in the latest version of Unicode (covering alphabets , abugidas and syllabaries ), although there are still scripts that are not yet encoded, particularly those mainly used in historical, liturgical, and academic contexts. Further additions of characters to the already encoded scripts, as well as symbols, in particular for mathematics and music (in the form of notes and rhythmic symbols), also occur. The Unicode Roadmap Committee ( Michael Everson , Rick McGowan, Ken Whistler, V.S. Umamaheswaran) maintain
624-654: A universal encoding than the original Unicode architecture envisioned. Version 1.0 of Microsoft's TrueType specification, published in 1992, used the name "Apple Unicode" instead of "Unicode" for the Platform ID in the naming table. The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development. Full members include most of the main computer software and hardware companies (and few others) with any interest in text-processing standards, including Adobe , Apple , Google , IBM , Meta (previously as Facebook), Microsoft , Netflix , and SAP . Over
672-483: Is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 of the standard defines 154 998 characters and 168 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts. Many common characters, including numerals, punctuation, and other symbols, are unified within
720-452: Is inserted following the first character of a cluster, and denotes a character cluster laid out with one character on the first line, as opposed to the usual two. Yel%C3%BC Diela Yelü Diela ( Chinese : 耶律迭剌 ) was the younger brother of the Liao dynasty founder Yelü Abaoji . He invented the " Khitan small script " to accommodate the more agglutinative Khitan language around
768-413: Is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding". In this document, entitled Unicode 88 , Becker outlined a scheme using 16-bit characters: Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as "wide-body ASCII " that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In
816-428: Is more than just a repertoire within which characters are assigned. To aid developers and designers, the standard also provides charts and reference data, as well as annexes explaining concepts germane to various scripts, providing guidance for their implementation. Topics covered by these annexes include character normalization , character composition and decomposition, collation , and directionality . Unicode text
864-457: Is not padded. There are a total of 2 + (2 − 2 ) = 1 112 064 valid code points within the codespace. (This number arises from the limitations of the UTF-16 character encoding, which can encode the 2 code points in the range U+0000 through U+FFFF except for the 2 code points in the range U+D800 through U+DFFF , which are used as surrogate pairs to encode the 2 code points in
912-417: Is processed and stored as binary data using one of several encodings , which define how to translate the standard's abstracted codes for characters into sequences of bytes. The Unicode Standard itself defines three encodings: UTF-8 , UTF-16 , and UTF-32 , though several others exist. Of these, UTF-8 is the most widely used by a large margin, in part due to its backwards-compatibility with ASCII . Unicode
960-480: Is projected to include 4301 new unified CJK characters . The Unicode Standard defines a codespace : a sequence of integers called code points in the range from 0 to 1 114 111 , notated according to the standard as U+0000 – U+10FFFF . The codespace is a systematic, architecture-independent representation of The Unicode Standard ; actual text is processed as binary data via one of several Unicode encodings, such as UTF-8 . In this normative notation,
1008-421: Is some speculation, it appears there are no characters that both the small and large scripts share. Periodically, epitaphs written using small script will be written using the large script method of linearity . Although small script had some similarities to Chinese, Khitan characters were often used to record Chinese words. The appearance of a likeness between a small script and a Chinese character does not help in
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#17327762801971056-400: Is then further subcategorized. In most cases, other properties must be used to adequately describe all the characteristics of any given code point. The 1024 points in the range U+D800 – U+DBFF are known as high-surrogate code points, and code points in the range U+DC00 – U+DFFF ( 1024 code points) are known as low-surrogate code points. A high-surrogate code point followed by
1104-576: The Mongolian scholar named Činggeltei , who used monuments, calendar , and similar Chinese texts to decipher sections of small script. A particularly valuable object of their study was the inscription on the Da Jin huangdi dutong jinglüe langjun xingji ( zh:大金皇弟都统经略郎君行记 ) stele, which is the only known bilingual Chinese-Khitan inscription. Produced during the Jurchen Jin dynasty it, ironically,
1152-571: The typeface , through the use of markup , or by some other means. In particularly complex cases, such as the treatment of orthographical variants in Han characters , there is considerable disagreement regarding which differences justify their own encodings, and which are only graphical variants of other characters. At the most abstract level, Unicode assigns a unique number called a code point to each character. Many issues of visual representation—including size, shape, and style—are intended to be up to
1200-578: The 1980s, to a group of individuals with connections to Xerox 's Character Code Standard (XCCS). In 1987, Xerox employee Joe Becker , along with Apple employees Lee Collins and Mark Davis , started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. With additional input from Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad , Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system in August 1988, tentatively called Unicode". He explained that "the name 'Unicode'
1248-567: The ISO's Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) use identical character names and code points. However, the Unicode versions do differ from their ISO equivalents in two significant ways. While the UCS is a simple character map, Unicode specifies the rules, algorithms, and properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages. Thus, The Unicode Standard includes more information, covering in-depth topics such as bitwise encoding, collation , and rendering. It also provides
1296-496: The core specification, published as a print-on-demand paperback, may be purchased. The full text, on the other hand, is published as a free PDF on the Unicode website. A practical reason for this publication method highlights the second significant difference between the UCS and Unicode—the frequency with which updated versions are released and new characters added. The Unicode Standard has regularly released annual expanded versions, occasionally with more than one version released in
1344-475: The discretion of the software actually rendering the text, such as a web browser or word processor . However, partially with the intent of encouraging rapid adoption, the simplicity of this original model has become somewhat more elaborate over time, and various pragmatic concessions have been made over the course of the standard's development. The first 256 code points mirror the ISO/IEC 8859-1 standard, with
1392-401: The following versions of The Unicode Standard have been published. Update versions, which do not include any changes to character repertoire, are signified by the third number (e.g., "version 4.0.1") and are omitted in the table below. The Unicode Consortium normally releases a new version of The Unicode Standard once a year. Version 17.0, the next major version,
1440-526: The group. By the end of 1990, most of the work of remapping existing standards had been completed, and a final review draft of Unicode was ready. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on 3 January 1991, and the first volume of The Unicode Standard was published that October. The second volume, now adding Han ideographs, was published in June 1992. In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism
1488-414: The initial, medial, and final sounds of the syllable). Sometimes the initial consonants of syllables are indicated to be dental , labial , guttural , or nasal etc., based on the syllabograms involved. Additionally, vowels are sometimes indicated to be labial or non-labial, or pronounced in the front or back of the mouth. Much of this information came from the "Khitan Script Research Group", led by
Khitan small script - Misplaced Pages Continue
1536-562: The intent of trivializing the conversion of text already written in Western European scripts. To preserve the distinctions made by different legacy encodings, therefore allowing for conversion between them and Unicode without any loss of information, many characters nearly identical to others , in both appearance and intended function, were given distinct code points. For example, the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block encompasses
1584-403: The last two code points in each of the 17 planes (e.g. U+FFFE , U+FFFF , U+1FFFE , U+1FFFF , ..., U+10FFFE , U+10FFFF ). The set of noncharacters is stable, and no new noncharacters will ever be defined. Like surrogates, the rule that these cannot be used is often ignored, although the operation of the byte order mark assumes that U+FFFE will never be the first code point in
1632-637: The list of scripts that are candidates or potential candidates for encoding and their tentative code block assignments on the Unicode Roadmap page of the Unicode Consortium website. For some scripts on the Roadmap, such as Jurchen and Khitan large script , encoding proposals have been made and they are working their way through the approval process. For other scripts, such as Numidian and Rongorongo , no proposal has yet been made, and they await agreement on character repertoire and other details from
1680-675: The modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 2 = 16,384. Beyond those modern-use characters, all others may be defined to be obsolete or rare; these are better candidates for private-use registration than for congesting the public list of generally useful Unicode. In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan Aliprand of Research Libraries Group , and Glenn Wright of Sun Microsystems . In 1990, Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag of Microsoft and NeXT 's Rick McGowan had also joined
1728-559: The previous environment of a myriad of incompatible character sets , each used within different locales and on different computer architectures. Unicode is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages , and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646 , each being code-for-code identical with one another. However, The Unicode Standard
1776-828: The range U+10000 through U+10FFFF .) The Unicode codespace is divided into 17 planes , numbered 0 to 16. Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), and contains the most commonly used characters. All code points in the BMP are accessed as a single code unit in UTF-16 encoding and can be encoded in one, two or three bytes in UTF-8. Code points in planes 1 through 16 (the supplementary planes ) are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16 and encoded in four bytes in UTF-8 . Within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters. The size of
1824-515: The reading of Khitan. For example, the Chinese character for 'mountain' ( 山 ) is the same as the Khitan small script logogram for 'gold' (and, thus, the name of the Jin dynasty ). Of the 378 known small script characters, 125 are semantic , 115 are phonetic , and the remainder have not been deciphered. (Usually, it was possible to guess the phonetic value of an element if it has been used to transcribe
1872-499: The standard and are not treated as specific to any given writing system. Unicode encodes 3790 emoji , with the continued development thereof conducted by the Consortium as a part of the standard. Moreover, the widespread adoption of Unicode was in large part responsible for the initial popularization of emoji outside of Japan. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters. Unicode has largely supplanted
1920-642: The tombs of Khitan nobility. There are about 33 known monuments with inscriptions in the Khitan small script, ranging in date from 1053 to 1171. The Khitan small script was added to Unicode version 13.0 in March 2020. 471 graphic characters are located in the Khitan Small Script block, while a single invisible filler character ( U+16FE4: KHITAN SMALL SCRIPT FILLER ) is located in the Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation block. The filler
1968-418: The two-character prefix U+ always precedes a written code point, and the code points themselves are written as hexadecimal numbers. At least four hexadecimal digits are always written, with leading zeros prepended as needed. For example, the code point U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN is padded with two leading zeros, but U+13254 𓉔 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH O004 ( [REDACTED] )
Khitan small script - Misplaced Pages Continue
2016-618: The user communities involved. Some modern invented scripts which have not yet been included in Unicode (e.g., Tengwar ) or which do not qualify for inclusion in Unicode due to lack of real-world use (e.g., Klingon ) are listed in the ConScript Unicode Registry , along with unofficial but widely used Private Use Areas code assignments. There is also a Medieval Unicode Font Initiative focused on special Latin medieval characters. Part of these proposals has been already included in Unicode. The Script Encoding Initiative,
2064-491: The year 925. The script was based partly on the earlier " Khitan large script " or Chinese-like logographic writing, but was also inspired by the vertically written Old Uyghur alphabet that was shown to him by an ambassador. This article on an Asian linguist is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This writing system –related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Unicode Unicode , formally The Unicode Standard ,
2112-640: The years several countries or government agencies have been members of the Unicode Consortium. Presently only the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs (Oman) is a full member with voting rights. The Consortium has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments. Unicode currently covers most major writing systems in use today. As of 2024 ,
2160-491: Was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This increased the Unicode codespace to over a million code points, which allowed for the encoding of many historic scripts, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs , and thousands of rarely used or obsolete characters that had not been anticipated for inclusion in the standard. Among these characters are various rarely used CJK characters—many mainly being used in proper names, making them far more necessary for
2208-435: Was less complex, yet still "able to record any word." While small-script inscriptions employed some logograms as well, most words in small script were made using a blocked system reminiscent of the later Hangul writing of Korea , meaning that a word is represented by one group (square block) composed of several glyphs with individual phonetic meanings (somewhat similar to the jamo units of Hangul). Unlike Hangul's jamo ,
2256-556: Was originally (before the discovery of other Khitan inscriptions in 1922) thought to be in Jurchen . There are no surviving examples of printed texts in the Khitan language, and aside from five example Khitan large characters with Chinese glosses in a book on calligraphy written by Tao Zongyi ( 陶宗儀 ) during the mid 14th century, there are no Chinese glossaries or dictionaries of Khitan. The main source of Khitan texts are monumental inscriptions, mostly comprising memorial tablets buried in
2304-483: Was originally designed with the intent of transcending limitations present in all text encodings designed up to that point: each encoding was relied upon for use in its own context, but with no particular expectation of compatibility with any other. Indeed, any two encodings chosen were often totally unworkable when used together, with text encoded in one interpreted as garbage characters by the other. Most encodings had only been designed to facilitate interoperation between
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