Besides several of the reasons mentioned in the original article (cultural differences of color and symbols, left to right / top to bottom writing systems, etc.

Besides several of the reasons mentioned in the original article (cultural differences of color and symbols, left to right / top to bottom writing systems, etc.) In many non-Roman scripts the letters change form drastically based on if they are at the beginning, middle, or end. In some, the letters literally switch positions with other letters visually. Current operating system font support, Unicode standards, and fonts simply don't exist to support all of this. Graphite (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&cat_id=RenderingGraphite http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&#38...) is one great initiative to get the ball moving here and is gaining some support (being included as part of OpenOffice 3), however there are HUGE steps that have not yet been taken before applications can even think about scaling to 3000 languages. Unicode is great, but it's not a simple solution/answer/cure-all. Hopefully we'll be able to scale that large one day, but luckily for now we only need to target < 1% of the world's languages.