Z to A

Last August I talked about the movie "יוסי וג'אגר" ("Yossi & Jagger"), an Israeli movie. I don't remember if I ever talked about "يد إلهية" ("Yadon ilaheyya" or "Divine Intervention"), an Israeli-Palestinian film. But certainly, those are two movies that have become quite important for me, for different reasons.

The other day I posted the עברי לידר (Ivri Lider) version of the song "The Man I Love", certainly my favourite of his, but not the only one I like, because I love "אוב" ("Bo" or "Let's" aka "Come" [just found this English version]) and I also love "דרפס" ("Sfarad" or "Spain").
A couple of weeks ago I met this Israeli guy and I had so many questions for him. It was very interesting, very educative.
Last night I went to watch "Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam". It is a German movie that talks about the golem, a mythological Jewish creature. I have to say that the movie was great, very interesting indeed and I'd like to watch it again but with someone who would explain every reference I see. The movie is silent, but last night it was accompanied by the improvisation of 2UT's experimental, New-Age music. I loved the evening. Thank you Sister for taking me. (Unfortunately, in this town, cultural events like this one do not succeed, plus it was pouring rain).
And, if you remember, I love the song "Wędrowni sztukmistrzowie", by Justyna Steczkowska (Album "AlkimJa"). [BTW, the lyrics of this song tell of how God is amused by clowns and magicians. Many things that happen in last night's movie reminded me so much of this album and, especially, this song.]
Also, I have talked few times about Тату (t.A.T.u.) and used Cyrillic and Greek alphabets (OMG, I am such a freak).

So all this to "justify my love" to the Hebrew/Jewish, Arab and Russian culture. And, last night's movie, made me to decide myself to write this post, which I have had in mind for a while.
All the languages that I speak use the Latin alphabet. English uses it plainly, without any "special" characters. Spanish and Catalan have different characters such as the ñ and the ç as well as diacritics such as the accents (àá) or the Catalan interpunct (l·l). But those characters are mostly found in any computer. In high school I studied ancient Greek and it was a mess when I wanted to write something with the computer. But also I have tried to learn Polish which uses other diacritics and characters such as ł or ż. This are not that easily found and even in their computers the have to use the AltGr key (for the Spanish-French-Galician-Portuguese-Catalan characters we use a separate key for characters and the combination of two keys for diacritics, i.e. ´ + o = ó), so it appears to be quite uncomfortable, but at least it is just few different characters.
If you try to search, say, caña in many search engines such as Google or Flickr, you'll see how it becomes "cana", which is a different word in Spanish (if you place inverted commas before and after the word, it will work in Google). So España has become Espana. I am "Espanol". When I was a child I envied my sister for having an acute in her name (such a geek I am, you see); now I am happy I don't, because if English-speaking people have trouble pronouncing my name (so I have to let them call me with its translation), imagine if it was something that they didn't know and if it had a little line on top. I'd be mad all the time I saw my name written.

Now, imagine if your language uses a writing system totally different to English. Imagine that you write right to left, or top to bottom. Imagine that the characters you use mix to become different characters (something similar to æ). And imagine that the "future" (i.e. computers, Internet and informatics science) does not make it easy for you to use your language.
This is what millions of people deal with every single day.
I love my languages and I really love English. I know I always say how great is this language. I know I am absolutely fine with the fact that this is the language used as lingua franca (my good friend LG, who is English-speaking, dislikes that). But also, I must say how unfair it is for those whose language cannot fit in this World Wide thing. We, users of Latin alphabet (with extensions), can cope with it, with the centralisation of the Internet by English Language.
Some day, all those languages will start using this letters I am using now. I don't mean just in the Internet, to go by with it, I mean as standard. Macedonian people are already using it (not widely though).
Linguists say that in a century from now there will only be 3 languages around the world: English, Spanish and Mandarin. I think Arabic will be there too (and I hope so because I want to learn it), but I also am sure that the last two will be using the Latin alphabet.
I know it is going to seem very incoherent, but I am fine with the usage of only this alphabet. Relations would be much easier, indeed. I don't speak Flemish, but at least I can read it (somehow), distinguish words and find streets. I don't speak Arabic and I can't do any of the previous things. With Hebrew and Cyrillic it is easier, but still.

When I uploaded the albums of Ivri Lider to my iTunes, I wrote the songs in Hebrew, in its Transliteration and in its translation to English. It was difficult because every time I was copy-paste-ing something, the order of characters were altered, i.e. since Hebrew writes right to left, it would mirror the word, so עברי לידר would become *רדיל ירבע.
That Israeli guy I met, told me that when using MSN or such, he had to keep shifting from Hebrew to English keyboard layout and that his conversations would appear on the right side even when writing in English (with question maks and such before the sentence, e.g. "?How are you").

I don't really know what is the point of all this. I don't know what I want to convey. What I know is that this is very unfair. If Internet had born in Morocco everything would be totally different: I think it would be easier for any other language.
Computers are the future, and computers are supposed to made our life easier. When is it going to start making everybody's life easy?

[Break news: now you can blog in Hindi.]