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Michael Everson | |
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| Born | January 1963 (age 62) |
| Occupation(s) | linguist,publisher |
Michael Everson (born January 1963) is an American and Irishlinguist,script encoder,typesetter,type designer andpublisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over one hundred books since 2006.
His central area of expertise is withwriting systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats forcomputer and digital media. In 2003 Rick McGowan said he was "probably the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts"[1] for his work to add a wide variety ofscripts andcharacters to theUniversal Character Set. Since 1993, he has written over two hundred proposals[2] which have added thousands of characters toISO/IEC 10646 and theUnicode standard; as of 2003, he was credited as the leading contributor of Unicode proposals.[1]
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Everson was born inNorristown, Pennsylvania, and moved toTucson, Arizona, at the age of 12. His interest in the works ofJ. R. R. Tolkien led him to studyOld English and then otherGermanic languages. He read German, Spanish, and French for hisB.A. at theUniversity of Arizona (1985), and the History of Religions andIndo-European linguistics for hisM.A. at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (1988)[citation needed].
In 1989, a former professor, Dr.Marija Gimbutas, asked him to read a paper[3] onBasque mythology at anIndo-Europeanist Conference held in Ireland; shortly thereafter he moved toDublin, where he studied as aFulbright Scholar in the Faculty ofCeltic Studies,University College Dublin (1991).[4] He became anaturalized Irish citizen in 2000, although he retains American citizenship.[1]
Everson is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields ofcharacter encodingstandardization andinternationalization. In addition to being one of the primary contributing editors of the Unicode Standard, he is also a contributing editor toISO/IEC 10646, registrar forISO 15924,[5] and subtag reviewer forBCP 47. He has contributed to the encoding of many scripts andcharacters in those standards, receiving the UnicodeBulldog Award in 2000[6] for his technical contributions to the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard. In 2004, Everson was appointed convenor ofISO TC46/WG3 (Conversion of Written Languages), which is responsible fortransliteration standards.
Everson is one of the co-editors (along with Rick McGowan, Ken Whistler, and V.S. Umamaheswaran) of the Unicode roadmaps that detail actual and proposed allocations for current and future Unicode scripts and blocks.[7]
On July 1, 2012, Everson was appointed to theVolapük Academy by theCifal,Brian R. Bishop, for his work inVolapük publishing.[8]
Everson has been actively involved in the encoding of many scripts[9] in the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards, includingAvestan,Balinese,Bamum,Bassa Vah,Batak,Braille,Brāhmī,Buginese,Buhid,Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics,Carian,Cham,Cherokee,Coptic,Cuneiform,Cypriot,Deseret,Duployan,Egyptian hieroglyphs,Elbasan,Ethiopic,Georgian,Glagolitic,Gothic,Hanunóo,Imperial Aramaic,Inscriptional Pahlavi,Inscriptional Parthian,Javanese,Kayah Li,Khmer,Lepcha,Limbu,Linear A,Linear B,Lycian,Lydian,Mandaic,Manichaean,Meitei Mayek,Mongolian,Myanmar,Nabataean,New Tai Lue,N'Ko,Ogham,Ol Chiki,Old Hungarian,Old Italic,Old North Arabian,Old Persian,Old South Arabian,Old Turkic,Osmanya,Palmyrene,Phaistos Disc,Phoenician,Rejang,Runic,Samaritan,Saurashtra,Shavian,Sinhala,Sundanese,Tagalog,Tagbanwa,Tai Le,Tai Tham,Thaana,Tibetan,Ugaritic,Vai, andYi, as well as many characters belonging to theLatin,Greek,Cyrillic, andArabic scripts.
Everson authored or co-authored proposals for many symbol characters for encoding into Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. Among those proposals submitted toISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 that have been accepted and encoded: N2586R (U+267E ♾PERMANENT PAPER SIGN and four other miscellaneous symbols[10] admitted into Unicode 4.1), N3727 (the 26Regional Indicator Symbols used in pairs to generatenational flags inemoji contexts;[11] adopted into Unicode 6.0), and N4783R2 (chess notation symbols[12] encoded into Unicode 11.0).
Among proposals that have not yet been approved for encoding: N1866 (an early proposal for encodingBlissymbols into theSupplementary Multilingual Plane of Unicode;[13] still listed in the SMP roadmap as of Unicode 15.0[14] although no further action had been taken on it for years).
Everson, along withDoug Ewell,Rebecca Bettencourt, Ricardo Bánffy, Eduardo Marín Silva, Elias Mårtenson, Mark Shoulson, Shawn Steele, and Rebecca Turner, is a contributor to the Terminals Working Group researching obscure characters found in legacycharacter sets used byhome computers (or "microcomputers"), terminals, and other legacy devices made from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s; thanks to their proposal L2/19-025, 212 graphic characters for compatibility withMSX,Commodore 64, and other microcomputers of the era, as well asTeletext, were encoded in theSymbols for Legacy Computing block,[15] while 731 additional characters from L2/21-235 have been accepted for a future version of the standard.[16]
In 1995 he designed aUnicode font,Everson Mono, amonospacedtypeface 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, afterLucida Sans Unicode andUnihan font (both 1993). In 2007 he was commissioned by the International Association of Coptic Studies to create a standard free Unicode 5.1 font for Coptic,Antinoou, using the Sahidic style.[17]
Together withJohn Cowan, he is also responsible for theConScript Unicode Registry, a project to coordinate the mapping ofartificial scripts into the UnicodePrivate Use Area. Among the scripts "encoded" in the CSUR,Shavian andDeseret were eventually formally adopted into Unicode; two other conscripts under consideration areTolkien's scripts ofTengwar andCirth.
Everson has also created locale and language information for many languages, from support for theIrish language and the otherCeltic languages to theminorityLanguages of Finland.[18] In 2000, together with Trond Trosterud, he co-authored Software localization into Nynorsk Norwegian, a report commissioned by theNorwegian Language Council. In 2003 he was commissioned by theUnited Nations Development Programme to prepare a report[19] on the computer locale requirements for the major languages ofAfghanistan (Pashto,Dari, andUzbek), co-authored by Roozbeh Pournader, which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of theAfghan Transitional Islamic Administration.[20] More recently,UNESCO's Initiative B@bel[21] funded Everson's work to encode theN'Ko andBalinese scripts.[22]
In 2007 he co-authored a proposal for a new standard written form ofCornish, calledKernowek Standard.[23] Following the publication of theStandard Written Form in 2008, Everson and a group of other users examined the specification and implemented a set of modifications to it, publishing a formal specification in 2012.[24]
As of March 2014[update] Everson operates a publishing company, Evertype, through which he has published a total of 295 books.[25] These include a wide range of titles by various authors and editors, with Everson himself as co-author of one, editor of several, and having adapted or revised several more. He also designed fonts for several.[25]
Everson has a particular interest inGaelic typeface design, and does a considerable amount of worktypesetting books in Irish for publication by Evertype.[26]
Another project consists of his publications of translations ofAlice's Adventures in Wonderland in many languages, amongst which areminority languages andconstructed languages.[27] Translations are available inCornish,Esperanto,French,German,Hawaiian,Irish,Italian,Jèrriais,Ladino,Latin,Lingua Franca Nova,Lingwa de planeta,Low German,Manx,Mennonite Low German, BorainPicard,Sambahsa,Scots,Shavian transliteration,Swedish,Ulster Scots andWelsh, with several other translations being prepared.[citation needed]
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