One could say that Unicode is the reflection of globalization in computing. So, being a computer scientist this huge project very much gets my attention and fascinates me on a daily basis. And Unicode is not just a feature, it is a foundation that bridges between languages and cultures in the digital world.

I'm on the train back from a workshop on Japanese and computing. For me it was something new meeting these people. I got a very warm welcome and had some nice conversations.

It's been some days but Language Log has a nice short article on Uyghur nouns together with their Mandarin forms: A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns.

Xiao'erjing is a way of writing Chinese in Arabic script. Basically it is a transcription similar to Pinyin used by people with knowledge of the Arabic script to denote the sounds of Mandarin or another "dialect". It is written from right to left (RTL).

Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Xiao'erjing: 人人生而自由…

When it comes to writing code, directives and commands are dictated by the programming language (e.g. if ... then ... else), which then is for most programming languages English[1], but when it comes to writing comments the programmer is free to choose which language he uses.