See also: segmentation in many Asian languages. Back around 2006, there was an internal collection of quotes from senior Google engineers. There was one from

See also: segmentation in many Asian languages. Back around 2006, there was an internal collection of quotes from senior Google engineers. There was one from a guy working on a particularly thorny issue with Russian search. He had just finished a project on Thai segmentation, and his response to how things were going with Russian was something like "Great! At least they have words!" (Obviously, he was being deliberately imprecise and understood that obviously Thai has words, just not whitespace-delimited.) On a side note, the Korean alphabet is well-designed. In particular, teaching children syllabification rules is trivial. Syllables are pre-arranged into squares. Unfortunately, the lack of distinction between r-l, and p-b-f, and restrictions on consonant clusters makes it unworkable as a replacement alphabet for English.