Cottleston Pie

I found myself wandering around the world of language encodings, Unicode and Indic languages in particular (South Asian languages as one would find in India).

I am certainly pleased that the English alphabet has only twenty-six characters, which fit neatly on a keyboard, uses few to none diacritical marks and no combination characters. Some English words have optional diacritical marks (such as in résumé) often in salute to the foreign language from which the word was adopted, but these accents may be safely dropped without penalty. Combination characters are appear a real significant complication for computers, especially because there are so many ways to achieve the same result.

English has all kinds of ideosyncracies of its own, but its simple character set can be a boon for computer applications. (Other languages may have this feature, but most with which I am familiar do not.)

That all said, I can see where combination characters are useful and efficient when handwriting, as are the many characters of the East Asian scripts that carry dense meaning.

While a simple character set is useful for input, on sufficiantly high-resolution displays, complex characters that convey a lot of meaning are potentially very useful for output where physical screen size is a limitation (and to various degrees, it is always a limitation).

I don't know much about East Asian scripts. Is War And Peace only half as long when translated into Japanese?