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Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

> Right, but you probably mostly deal with a documents written in a language with a Latin script. Those who don't or can't do this need better.

So, I absolutely love different scripts, and I think it's awesome how many different ways to write mankind has invented over the centuries.

But if Latin-style scripts are so much easier to input into computers, and if computers are not just the wave of the future but the present as well, maybe it would make sense for more languages to adopt Latin-style scripts. After all, we stopped using fractions everywhere in favour of decimals, because decimals are in many cases (not all!) better. Ditto our switch from Roman to Arabic numerals.

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> But if Latin-style scripts are so much easier to input into computers, and if computers are not just the wave of the future but the present as well

But the hard part isn't supporting _a_ script, it's supporting _all_ scripts (or at least, all relevant scripts, in our modern interconnected age). It's only moderately more complicated, even with existing latin-centric tools, to only support a single script. Heck, If you only support Chinese + Japanese for example: you can always assume monospacing, which makes layout a breeze; line-wrapping rules are extremely simple [0]; and word-breaking (and associated headaches, like hyphenation and inter-word spacing) is practically a non-factor.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_As...

"Just drop your language's writing system in favor of the latin alphabet!"

"It's a hard problem (and doesn't affect me) so let's ignore it altogether!"

Must be easy to make remarks like this when your native language happens to use the latin alphabet...

How about we use our knowledge to build computer systems that respect different writing systems, even if it's hard, instead of enforcing a latin hegemony upon the rest of the world.

Comparing scripts to numeral notation is comparing apples to oranges. The latin syllabary does not work for languages that have more sounds than are represented by 26 characters!

Try that again, but try the suggestion of not using latin characters any longer in favour of, say, the highly logical Korean Hangul writing system.

Still as keen on the idea?

Actually, I almost added, 'why not switch to something like a universal Hangul while we're at it?'

By moving from a non-Latin script to a Latin script, you destroy puns, and I feel that destroys the culture, too. It is too big a price to pay.

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