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I believe Hebrew would work pretty well too. There are 22 letters, it's also phonetically very similar to Latin characters. Most words are also shorter in Hebre
by asnyder 17y ago
I believe Hebrew would work pretty well too. There are 22 letters, it's also phonetically very similar to Latin characters. Most words are also shorter in Hebrew, but are phonetically equivalent to an English sounding word. For example, "Comment" could be "כמנת", thus 4 characters instead of 6, and are phonetically equivalent.
- iskander 17y ago>, it's also phonetically very similar to Latin characters. The history of alphabets is awesome. Phoenician -> Aramaic -> Hebrew Phoenician -> Greek -> Latin
- xsmasher 17y agoI'm not sure it passes the 8x8 pixel font test, though.
- sliverstorm 17y agoSuddenly another interesting thing springs to mind. Punctuation has become all kinds of useful for computers in the shell, in programming, etc. Things like / for folders is intuitive and easy to see. Do many other languages, particularly the better candidates w/ lower letter counts such as Hebrew, have punctuation beyond the period? Edit: good for them, Hebrew does have punctuation.
- _delirium 17y agoHebrew does, but only really because it imported it from modern European languages recently. Classical Hebrew and the religious Hebrew of the middle ages didn't have much in the way of punctuation, but when it was revived in the 19th century as a living language by European Zionists, it borrowed (adapted versions of) the punctuation common to European languages of the time.
- asnyder 17y agoHmm, I think it does. You can see the aleph-bet in ASCII here: http://www.ascii-codes.net/cp862.html http://www.ascii-codes.net/cp862.html, seems like it fits into 8x8 to me.
- cool-RR 17y agoI'm a Hebrew speaker, and I really doubt it. Whenever I get some technological appliance that can speak Hebrew, I turn it to English. One of the big reasons is that Hebrew is right-to-left, which is a nightmare. You can't even type Facebook comments in Hebrew and have them correctly aligned.
- jerf 17y agoIf we'd started with Hebrew, it would be left-to-right that would be the nightmare. That's just because we've got left-to-right ground in deeply in our software, not for a fundamental physical reason (in the way that vertical orientation is arguably less useful to humans as our field-of-view is a horizontal elliptical shape, not a sphere or vertical shape).