We live in a complicated world when it comes to languages and scripts
Arabic goes from right to left. Japanese characters need “double byte” support. Russia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine and several other countries use the Cyrillic script which has 21 consonants and 10 vowels. Hindi, spoken in India, is written in the Devanagari script where if a vowel follows a consonant, it does not take two characters, it is merged into one.
And those are actually not the most difficult ones!
We need to thank the UNICODE standard for allowing so many scripts to be digitized. Amazing the progress in last 18 years since it was started.
When it was first adopted in October 1991 it supported 7,161 characters. In version 5.2 which came out in October, we were up to 107,361. That covers 90 scripts and the latest release, also covers support for 1071 Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The fact that any of us can go to the Google Translate page and specify one of 51 scripts from Afrikaans to Yiddish and point to a URL and have it translated (transliterate is probably a better term) into English or any of the other 50 in seconds – for free – is progress you have to stop and admire!
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