Michael Everson
Encyclopedia
Michael Everson is a linguist
, script encoder
, typesetter
, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing system
s of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer
and digital media. He holds both American and Irish citizenship.
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 has written over two hundred proposals which have added thousands of characters to ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard.
, 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 became a naturalized
Irish citizen in 2000. He currently lives in Lecanvey
, west of Westport
, County Mayo
. He is a nontheistic
Buddhist
.
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
, 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.
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
.
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 Kernowek Standard
. The same year he was commissioned by the International Association of Coptic Studies to create a standard free unicode 5.1 font for Coptic, Antinoou. This uses the Sahidic typeface.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, script encoder
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
, typesetter
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
and digital media. He holds both American and Irish citizenship.
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
Character (computing)
In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....
to the Universal Character Set
Universal Character Set
The Universal Character Set , defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal multiple-octet coded character set , is a standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based...
. Since 1993, he has written over two hundred proposals which have added thousands of characters to ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard.
Life
Everson was born in NorristownNorristown, Pennsylvania
Norristown is a municipality in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, northwest of the city limits of Philadelphia, on the Schuylkill River. The population was 34,324 as of the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Montgomery County...
, Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, and moved to Tucson
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...
, Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
at the age of 12. His interest in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
led him to study Old English
Old English language
Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
and then other Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
. He read German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
for his B.A. at the University of Arizona
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
(1985), and the History of Religions and Indo-European linguistics for his M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
(1988). In 1989, his former professor Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas , was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological...
asked him to read a paper on Basque mythology
Basque mythology
The mythology of the ancient Basques largely did not survive the, albeit late, arrival of Christianity in the Basque Country between the 4th and 12th century AD...
at an Indo-Europeanist
Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...
Conference held in Ireland
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
; shortly thereafter he moved to Dublin, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar in the Faculty of Celtic Studies
Celtic Studies
Celtic studies is the academic discipline occupied with the study of any sort of cultural output relating to a Celtic people. This ranges from linguistics, literature and art history archaeology and history, the focus lying on the study of the various Celtic languages, living and extinct...
, University College Dublin
University College Dublin
University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...
(1991). He became a naturalized
Naturalization
Naturalization is the acquisition of citizenship and nationality by somebody who was not a citizen of that country at the time of birth....
Irish citizen in 2000. He currently lives in Lecanvey
Lecanvey
Lecanvey or Leckanvy is a seaside village in County Mayo, Ireland, between Westport and Louisburgh, about 2 km west of Murrisk. It has a small beach with Lecanvey Pier. To the south is Croagh Patrick...
, west of Westport
Westport, County Mayo
Westport is a town in County Mayo, Ireland. It is situated on the west coast at the south-east corner of Clew Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean....
, County Mayo
County Mayo
County Mayo is a county in Ireland. It is located in the West Region and is also part of the province of Connacht. It is named after the village of Mayo, which is now generally known as Mayo Abbey. Mayo County Council is the local authority for the county. The population of the county is 130,552...
. He is a nontheistic
Nontheism
Nontheism is a term that covers a range of both religious and nonreligious attitudes characterized by the absence of — or the rejection of — theism or any belief in a personal god or gods...
Buddhist
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
.
Work
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
standardization
Standardization
Standardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
and internationalization
Internationalization
In economics, internationalization has been viewed as a process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization or international entrepreneurship...
. 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
ISO 15924
ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems . Each script is given both a four-letter code and a numeric one....
, and subtag reviewer for BCP 47. He has contributed to the encoding of many scripts and characters
Character (computing)
In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....
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
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...
TC46/WG3 (Conversion of Written Languages), which is responsible for transliteration
Transliteration
Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
standards.
Everson has been actively involved in the encoding of many scripts in the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards.
Together with John Cowan, he is also responsible for the ConScript Unicode Registry
ConScript Unicode Registry
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. It was founded by and is maintained by John Cowan and Michael Everson...
, 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
Deseret alphabet
The Deseret alphabet is a phonemic English spelling reform developed in the mid-19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret under the direction of Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.In public statements, Young claimed the...
were eventually formally adopted into Unicode; two other conscripts under consideration are Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
's scripts of Tengwar
Tengwar
The Tengwar are an artificial script created by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his fictional universe of Middle-earth, the tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor, and used first to write the Elven tongues: Quenya, Telerin, and also Valarin. Later a great number of languages of Middle-earth were written...
and Cirth
Cirth
The Cirth are the letters of an semi-artificial script which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works. The initial C in Cirth is pronounced as a K, never as an S....
.
Everson has also created locale and language information for many languages, from support for the Irish language
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
and the other Celtic languages
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
to the minority languages of Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
. In 2000, together with Trond Trosterud, he co-authored Software localization into Nynorsk Norwegian, a report commissioned by the Norwegian Language Council
Norwegian Language Council
The Norwegian Language Council was the regulation authority for the Norwegian language. It has been superseded by The Language Council of Norway .The council had 38 members, and created lists of acceptable word forms...
. In 2003 he was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme
United Nations Development Programme
The United Nations Development Programme is the United Nations' global development network. It advocates for change and connects countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life. UNDP operates in 177 countries, working with nations on their own solutions to...
to prepare a report on the computer locale requirements for the major languages of Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
(Pashto
Pashto language
Pashto , known as Afghani in Persian and Pathani in Punjabi , is the native language of the indigenous Pashtun people or Afghan people who are found primarily between an area south of the Amu Darya in Afghanistan and...
, Dari
Dari (Eastern Persian)
Dari or Fārsī-ye Darī in historical terms refers to the Persian court language of the Sassanids. In contemporary usage, the term refers to the dialects of modern Persian language spoken in Afghanistan, and hence known as Afghan Persian in some Western sources. It is the term officially recognized...
, and Uzbek
Uzbek language
Uzbek is a Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 25.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia...
), co-authored by Roozbeh Pournader, which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration
Politics of Afghanistan
The politics of Afghanistan consists of the Council of Ministers and the National Assembly, with a president serving as the head of state and commander-in-chief of the military. The nation is currently led by the Karzai administration under President Hamid Karzai who is backed by two vice...
. More recently, UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
's Initiative B@bel funded Everson's work to encode the N'Ko and Balinese scripts.
He also has a particular interest in Gaelic
Gaelic script
Gaelic type, sometimes called Irish character, Irish type, or Gaelic script, is a family of insular typefaces devised for printing Irish and used between the 16th and 20th centuries. Sometimes all Gaelic typefaces are called Celtic or uncial, though most Gaelic types are not uncials...
typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
design, and does a considerable amount of work typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
books in Irish. In 1995 he designed the Unicode font, Everson Mono
Everson Mono
Everson Mono is a monospaced humanist sans serif Unicode font whose development by Michael Everson began in 1995. At first, Everson Mono was a collection of 8-bit fonts containing glyphs for tables in ISO/IEC 10646; at that time, it was not easy to edit cmaps to have true Unicode indices, and there...
, a monospaced typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
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
Lucida Sans Unicode
In digital typography, Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font from the design studio of Bigelow & Holmes is designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard...
and Unihan font
Unihan font
Unihan font was developed by Ross Paterson in 1993.Unihan font had two variations, 16x16 and 24x24 pixel fonts. These covered most of theCJK Auxiliary and UniHan portions of Unicode. Font files were in HBF format...
(both 1993).
In 2007 he co-authored a proposal for a new standard written form of Cornish
Cornish language
Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...
, called Kernowek Standard
Kernowek Standard
Kernowek Standard is a variety of revived Cornish and a proposed set of revisions to the Standard Written Form. Developed gradually by a group called UdnFormScrefys , it was published as a proposal in a series of revisions. Its principal authors were Michael Everson, Neil Kennedy, and Nicholas...
. The same year he was commissioned by the International Association of Coptic Studies to create a standard free unicode 5.1 font for Coptic, Antinoou. This uses the Sahidic typeface.
External links
- Evertype.com, Michael Everson's web site
- An interview with Michael Everson by Dick Gordon on The Connection, a National Public Radio public affairs call-in program
- The Unicode Consortium