There’s an interesting article in the online version of India’s national newspaper, The Hindi, about HP that you should see. They’re trying to help those with non-Western language systems use computers more easily.Many of us take it for granted that all languages are like ours, with a certain set of characters that can be combined in any order. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Many languages have unique characters that are used in only certain parts of a sentence or word, depending either on meaning or the combination of characters around it.That doesn’t even touch a language like Chinese, whose characters are far more numerous than the 26 we deal with. Hopefully this will be a step towards a better user interface for people around the world.
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Monday March.20.2006 at 9:12 am PST
mixed moss
I have a friend who is bi-racial and bi-lingual. When he writes to his mother in Japanese on his laptop, he types in what the Japanese words sound like phonetically– that is, uses the separate set of Japanese characters for sounds– and then his computer gives him a pop-up list of the traditional characters for the words he might mean, and he selects the right one. It takes him forever. Not to mention the fact that it is all complicated by the fact that the Japanese phonetic characters do not appear on his keyboard– just the Western ones. So he has to remember which Western character is the equivalent of the Japanese phonetic sound. Crazy!
-Mel