ASCII - Unicode • Chaos

So, where to begin ? I recently (at the beginning of this year) designed a multi-lingual website as a chapter of discovery surrounding my AlphaBet research project – (several years working at Google as a software engineer designing transliteration tools and algorithmic improvements to allow people to use various keyboards to map between languages) – and was surprised to discover how certain web hosts continue to fumble Unicode.

An exploration of ChatGPT’s cross-linguistic abilities, disguised as a font-exploration project.

This led to me language relationship that long interested me: that between Arabic and Mongolian (with the common ancestor of Sogdian, father of the Semitic languages. “𐽀𐼰𐼵𐼷 𐽅𐼽𐼱𐼰𐼻” : )

I started to create a personal website, inspired by some of the RTL and vertical CSS_magic I was discovering. Unfortunately in this screenshot the Mongolian cursive is broken (a familiar experience to Arabic-speakers) .. but it shows some of what I was aspiring to create:

Naturally, I hosted it and found that the website that was hosting totally butchered the Unicode, performing a very strange (and actually very interesting) transmutation :

As I had just travelled through Iceland, England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain, I was intrigued to see such a wide spectrum of Latin-variety characters. As someone who’s long been fascinated with languages… where to begin!

What an interesting rainbow of language.

(before), & (after)

🌈

🌞