Multilingualism

I have heard much about computer programs being made in different languages. I know specially about Hindi (Devanagari script). Many people say that it is not suitable for computer typing and other computer activities.

What I feel is that you are trying to wear socs in your hand and then criticizing hand for not being perfect to wear the socs. But the reality is that those socs were not made for hands. If you want to cover your hands, you will have to wear gloves, which are specifically made for hands.

Similar is the case with the use of Hindi in computers. All the computer codes (ASCII as well as UNICODE) have been designed in accordance with the roman script. And then, we are trying to enforce the same standard on various scripts which are actually substantially different from the roman script both in character as well as appearance. For example, take the case of Devanagari. In this script, vowels are not separate entities as is the case with roman script. But actually vowels are more like a property of consonants to which they are associated. In Hindi, no consonant can be separately pronounced. It is always pronounced in conjunction with a vowel, opposite to roman script, where every alphabet no matter consonant ot vowel can be pronounced seperately. I feel this is the fundamental difference between Devanagari and Roman scripts, which has been overlooked while framing standards. I do not know about other scripts, but I am sure that each language has some peculiar character, which when taken into account, can make the life of multilingual software designers much easy.

I propose a new standard which will use 16 bit code to store each character. First 5 bits will represent the identity of the language and will be unique to each langauge. Once that language has been identified, rest of the bits can be distributed for various propeties of characters. For example, in the case of Hindi, 4 characters can be reserved for vowel associated and rest of the bits for storing consonant. There are enough bits to store special characters also.

Please post your comments on this.