The mail I got yesterday pointed out an interesting article:

The BBC's Elizabeth Blunt reports from Addis Ababa on the increasing popularity of mobile phones which permit text messages in Amharic.

Ethiopians get texting in Amharic

The article is interesting for several reasons, including but not limited to:

  • The way it refers to the script as Ge'ez rather than Ethiopic (the latter is generally considered the name, the former is an ancient language using it).
  • The irony Elizabeth points out (about it happening "...in a country where until recently text messaging was not allowed in any language.").
  • The fact that if she has her facts right about the Ethiopic calendar support than at best somewhere between 0% and 50% of it is based on Microsoft technologies (and the calendar/date info would all have to be provided by Nokia, perhaps through ICU or some other means, since the Vista support for Ethiopic specifically does not include calendar/date support and AFAIK there is no available version of Windows Mobile/CE that has up to the level of Vista's Ethiopic support....

Now if that last point is true then I am still very happy for the customer, even if I am frustrated that as a company we may have really missed the boat here, despite wonderful work on the typography side to support the language and script.

I am intensely curious about the five Nokia devices planned for the market, including the basic model (the Nokia 1200) being rolled out now, and what OS is running on it.

Does anyone know for sure?

Either way, I think that Microsoft and others has to work harder to support scenarios like this from end to end. Typography/rendering is in essence the most expensive and sometimes hardest piece to globalization support for a given language, and if we can do that then failing to do the rest is like hitting the ball almost out of the park, making a triple coming 'round to home plate, and stopping before touching the plate so that someone has the opportunity to tag you out....

I don't know what the plans are for Amharic/Tigrinia/Ge'ez/etc. in the next version either, but it may clearly be time to figure out what the plans are here....

 

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