Remember Han Unification and other Unicode problems? How far away this sometimes seems.
"Bengali is the seventh most common native language in the world, sitting ahead of the eighth (Russian) by a wide margin, with as many native speakers as French, German, and Italian combined. And yet, on the Internet, Bengali is very much a second-class citizen – as are Arabic (#5), Hindi (#4), and Mandarin (#1) – any language which is not written with the Latin alphabet. … The evolution of emoji is impressive and fascinating, but it makes for an uncomfortable contrast when other pictorial writing systems – the most commonly-used writing systems on the planet – are on the chopping block. We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (💩), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly."
-- I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name, by Aditya Mukerjee, for Model View Culture
@alex atleast Bengalis are vocal about it (atleast now). The Chinese have Chinese keyboards on laptops, so they are better off whatever the Unicode situation is. Even a ASCII equivalent of Chinese/Bengali/Hindi would do as an input method, and it is sort of there with the itrans system (albeit Unicode-based).
