Dear Log,
I've been busy busy busy on my article for the next issue of The Perl Journal. It's about Text::Unidecode, which turns all writing systems into US-ASCII. The example writing system that I focus on in the article is Divehi, the script used by people in the Maldives, an atoll (a word that originally started out as a label for just those specific islands, in fact) in the Indian Ocean, south-southwest of India, right on the Equator.
Divehi is related to Sinhalese, but its writing system is very different. Good thing, too -- if it were written the same as Sinhalese, I'd have to find some other almost-as-good writing system as an example for my article.
Not that
Sinhalese script is exactly hard to look at, tho. In fact,
Sinhalese is one of my favorite writing systems, along with
Tibetan
and Burmese
And some styles of Khmer
can be real pretty, too; and I do wish that the
Mongolians would use Old
Script more often. Hard to read, but very pretty.
Odd that these writing systems are all native to countries with
with troubled politics. Altho calling what happened in Cambodia a matter
of "politics" is a bit of an understatement.
A thought about the Maldives: I wonder what it's like being from a
country that almost no-one has ever heard of. "I'm from the Maldives."
"Malta?" "No, the Maldives." "That's that country by Romania, isn't it?"
"No, it's off the coast of India." "Oh, I bet it's one of those tiny
little desert islands with just a dozen
Polynesian
people on it!" "Well,
there's a third of a million of us, and we're not Polynesian."
I don't know about buying land there, though. Coral-reef atolls
and rising sea levels don't really mix well.
