UNESCO Seed Funding for Universal Scripts Project Complemented US Research Grant: UNESCO-CI

Helping Computers deal with other alphabets:

"The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a two-year grant to the University of California at Berkeley for the Universal Scripts Project, a project that will support authoring of sixteen Unicode script proposals. The NEH grant represents complements seed-funding from UNESCO's Initiative B@bel, which has funded work on the N'ko and Balinese scripts.

"The grant, totalling $217,700 in outright funds and $40,000 in federal matching funds, will run from January 2005 through December 2006 and will be led by Deborah Anderson. The Universal Scripts Project is a continuation of the Script Encoding Initiative established at UC Berkeley in 2002.

"Five historic scripts are earmarked for immediate work on this project, including the basic set of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Eleven modern scripts will also be prepared for encoding. The modern scripts are used by minorities in Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa. The number of minority language users of these scripts is over 20 million."