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The Character Issue, Part II

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In Part I I talked about diacriticals on the Web and reviewed ways multilingual users deal with outdated English-only technology while waiting for the Internet to catch up. Somewhere out there, a Russian, Chinese, or Arab reader is probably thinking, "I should have such problems!" To cybernauts who don't use the Roman alphabet, complaints about diacriticals sound a lot like Nixon's Checkers speech. This week's column will shed some light on the non-Roman Internet challenge and suggest starting points for users of other writing systems.

For computing purposes, non-Roman writing systems can be sorted into three categories. There are alphabetic languages (those whose symbols represent spoken sounds) which are written left to right, like the Roman alphabet. Bulgarian and Thai are examples. Other alphabetic languages, such as Hebrew and Farsi, are written right to left. (Syllabaries behave like alphabets on computers, so I've included them in the two alphabetic categories.) Lastly, some writing systems use freestanding ideograms that have little or no relationship to the spoken language. Rather, an ideogram embodies a concept, and may represent several different words depending upon context. For example, in the famous "I (heart) NY" bumper sticker, the heart is an ideogram. In other contexts it might be pronounced "heart," "cardiac" or "coronary," but in the bumper sticker it means "love." Chinese and Japanese kanji work similarly.

Non-Roman, left-to-right alphabets are theoretically easy to use online. Just load a new font and you're alive and happening. However, as we saw in Part I, variations in programme, server, and platform, along with good old diacriticals, muddy affairs considerably. I used to chat with a jovial band of Slavs who used Russian as their lingua franca. Unfortunately, our chat system didn't support Cyrillic characters, so we were forced to write Russian using the Roman alphabet. The clumsy "Rusglish" was difficult to decipher, especially for learners like myself. Arguments over transliteration often interrupted the conversation. All agreed Romanised Russian couldn't accurately express our thoughts and feelings.

Languages written right-to-left, such as Yiddish and Arabic, present an even thornier problem. Suitably-updated Apple desktops handle non-Roman alphabets with surprising ease; they can even mix left- and right-handed languages on a single page. Similar packages exist for Windows. These may or may not solve problems online, but are a good place to start.

However, for headaches on the so-called "Worldwide" Web, nothing beats ideograms. Japanese takes the prize; it simultaneously uses two exclusive syllabaries, or kana, and 3,000 kanji. The Japanese sometimes manipulate their language in romaji (Roman characters), but as usual, this is a poor substitute for reliable communication. They can also spell out kanji-represented words in kana. The result reads easier than romaji, but is still awkward and inelegant.

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