Ancestor-descendant distance

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

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> From: Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
> On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

>> We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode,
>> which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration
>> (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA).
>> It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative
>> Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated,
>> so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies
>> such as this.

> I agree totally.  We're on exactly the same wavelength here.

The only problem with Unicode is that it isn't uniformly supported by
computer programs.  Any Unicode-based effort would be restricted to the
Internet Explorer browser as Netscape Navigator doesn't support it.  You
either wish for the future and sacrifice present compatibility, or you make
some compromises.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
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