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Holy cow, has Smashing always published these sorts of articles, or is this an outlier? Quite the departure from their often-linked "40 Wordpress Themes!" posts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great, now I won't sleep tonight as I learn the difference between syllabic alphabets and syllabaries. I hate you in the kindest way possible. ;]
If you're interested in human languages, another great place on the internet is: http://www.ethnologue.com/ I've spent countless hours on both Omniglot and Ethnologue.
This was a fascinating and very informative read. I spent many a nights toiling over the intricacies of the Devanagari script when I was coding http://chime.tv/products/hind2000/ss.shtml as a kid. My biggest take-away was that combining different characters is pretty much required though difficult to implement. If you spell "MItI" and then edited it to "MIttI", I would have to replace the 't' with a special double 't…
It's like Nastaliq's (the Urdu script) jazm character: http://users.skynet.be/hugocoolens/newurdu/specials.html
I think it's a sane move.
Holy cow, has Smashing always published these sorts of articles, or is this an outlier? Quite the departure from their often-linked "40 Wordpress Themes!" posts.
This was a fascinating and very informative read. I spent many a nights toiling over the intricacies of the Devanagari script when I was coding http://chime.tv/products/hind2000/ss.shtml as a kid. My biggest take-away was that combining different characters is pretty much required though difficult to implement. If you spell "MItI" and then edited it to "MIttI", I would have to replace the 't' with a special double 't…
The new convention for happy co-existence with the pared-down font engines packaged in devices like the iPhone is to use two 't' characters after all, but add a slanting accent underneath the first 't' (or whatever letter it is) to indicate that it should only be 'pronounced half'. It's like Nastaliq's (the Urdu script) jazm character: http://users.skynet.be/hugocoolens/newurdu/specials.html I think it's a sane move.
I don't think the convention of the slanting accent ("virama" or "halant") is new. I know it's been used in books for at least the last hundred years. This means that conjoined ligatures aren't strictly necessary, but they're used a lot in handwriting and IMO look quite beautiful.