Everything about Michael Everson totally explained
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.
He has been described as "probably the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts" for his work to add a wide variety of
scripts and
characters to the
Universal Character Set. Since 1993, he's written over two hundred proposals which have added thousands of characters to
ISO/IEC 10646 and
The Unicode Standard.
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
nontheistic Buddhist.
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's also a contributing editor to
ISO/IEC 10646, registrar for
ISO 15924, 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 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.
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.
Together with John Cowan, he's 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.
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. 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 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. More recently,
UNESCO's Initiative B@bel funded Everson's work to encode the
N'Ko and
Balinese scripts.
He also has a particular interest in Gaelic
typeface design, and does a considerable amount of work
typesetting books in Irish . 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).
In 2007 he co-authored a proposal for a new standard written form of
Cornish, called
Kernowak.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Michael Everson'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://michael_everson.totallyexplained.com">Michael Everson Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
