04 Thai script examples
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Techtalk
World languages – a challenge for displaying content on screens of electronic devices worldwide For frequent flyers, the world seems to have shrunk in the course of globalization. Trips with stops in Dubai yesterday, Hong Kong today and Madrid tomorrow are not unusual. And you meet old acquaintances everywhere: the vitamin A-infused smartphones, the grey-haired actor with the big brown eyes advertising his coffee, or the camcorder you bought the other week that because it is ‘technology you can trust’. The world is small and yet a big marketplace for manufacturers of electronic devices that have become such an integral part of our everyday life. Those not travelling as often might not have given a thought yet to what it really is that globally marketed products of the technological wonder world need to be: good at languages! Language, type, and typography make up the cultural differences that have withstood the digital revolution and liberalization of world trade, up through today. The twelve world languages, those most common globally, can serve as an example for typographic choice. Like the Latin script, Cyrillic is consists of an alphabet of individual signs. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are a bit more complicated. Chinese is written with logographic characters, a system that
04 Satzbausteine in thailändischer Schrift
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Fonts in Focus 9 uses individual symbols to represent specific sounds or ideas. A single Chinese character may have different pronunciations, depending on dialect, just as a tone may have several possible meanings, depending on context. The Japanese language uses three scripts: the logographic Kanji together with the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries. Symbols from the Latin script, used additionally in Japan, are referred to as Romaji. Japanese writing direction depends on context, and is either horizontal – from left to right – or vertical. Vertical text reads from top to bottom, left to right. The Korean script groups letters into syllabic clusters. Bengali, Hindi and Arabic are even more complex. Let us have a closer look at the latter two: Hindi is based on the Devanagari syllabary, with glyphs containing inherent vowels along with the depicted consonants and diacritics modifying the basic syllables. Devanagari is written from left to right; it contains 33 consonants, 13 vowels and two additional phonemes, as well as several ligatures. Arabic is written from right to left, except for the numbers which are written from left to right. Vocalization marks are added above or below the characters but are usually left out of everyday texts. Arabic is a partially connected script, with glyphs taking on a different appearance depending on the adjacent characters Many characters can form ligatures depending on the style – unattached text as in the Roman alphabet is not the norm. Word processing and layout software therefore need to recognize the context and deliver the look of the appropriate character. This is why for example Adobe InDesign comes in a special Middle East version, as Arabic texts need extra functionalities. Due to these enormous differences in linguistics and typography, manufacturers of electronic devices need to distinguish