Word Alive 2003 Spring

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The variety and complexity of non-Roman scripts is an extreme challenge for computers to display text properly.

Beyond mere display, the accurate manipulation of language data is probably one of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st Century.

The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) continues to research this problem.

While we in the Western world read and write with the Roman alphabet, more than half of the world's population doesn't use that kind of writing. Their non-Roman scripts look and behave very differently, presenting unique challenges for computers and computer software. This chart shows some of the differences.

Reordering of Characters

In Roman text, characters generally appear in the order they are pronounced. This is often not the case in other scripts. In the non-Roman example below, characters are reordered, they change shape and are re-positioned.

Roman: English

Non-Roman: Devanagari

Characters in Context

Roman characters have fairly consistent shapes when they are used. In many other scripts, characters change their shape according to where they appear.

Roman: English

Non-Roman: Arabic
Consonants sensitive to word position

Baseline

People who use writing systems based on the Roman alphabet learn to print letters so they sit on a line. In other scripts, this isn't always the case.

Roman: English--Bottom Baseline

Non-Roman: Devanagari--Hanging Baseline

Direction Lines of writing may run in different directions than they do in our Roman-based, English text.	Non-Roman: Mongolian Top to bottom, left to right
Roman: English Left to right, top to bottom

Scripts Around the Globe

Non-Roman script writing systems can be found all around the world, especially in South and Southeast Asia. This map shows characters in many different languages that correspond to the same sounds of the Roman characters b, n and s. Click above for larger Map File.
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