Languages. What I've been working on this week is the ability for the software we're creating to be used by people who speak different languages. It's really interesting. I've developed a French interface, based on the piddly bits I remember from high school, and a little help from an on-line translator.

Two of the languages we were hoping to support, Hindi and Thai, are just not expressable by the underlying software (Java, or more specifically, Swing) because they are so strange in written form. They're promising to support them someday, but as for now, we're just stuck. My officemate, who's Indian, says that nobody uses Swing in India because of this.

Hindi is an interesting written language!

All the "letters" hang off of an imaginary line.

Consonants have vowels automatically associated with them (but which can get overridden by vowels).

No spaces between words (until recently, I think).

They have their own symbols for numbers (until recently, again; they've started to use Arabic numbers).

The order of consonants and vowels may not necessarily correspond to the phonetic order!

Although it goes left to right, sometimes symbols are stacked vertically.

There are some symbols (called conjuncts) that stand for collections of other consonants.

No wonder it's not supported in Swing. Are we just lucky that English is so much easier to render? There are apparently some theories that state we've been able to advance faster due to the fact that our language is boiled down to a small number of easily represented symbols. Imagine trying to print Hindi on an eighteenth century printing press.

I do think Hindi is more aesthetically pleasing than English, though, but not as much as Arabic or Hieratic (as we once saw in the British Museum). I've been thinking of taking a caligraphy course; around here, it would probably have to be Chinese though. My Japanese lessons are on hold until they find some more people who are willing to attend.