If you want to send a non-Latin script text message to a mobile phone, do it via the web. The South African firm SMSWarehouse is tryng to extend market share by offering a Unicode-based texting service on its web site. You log in, select a virtual keyboard for the script of your choice (Arabic, Greek, Russian, Chinese etc), and tap out your message. It displays the other end on a script-compatible mobile phone. This enabling loop via the web is a clever wheeze, but you’d expect most texters would want to operate straight from a mobile phone themselves.

The London Times reports on a messaging competition pitching a 93 year old telegraph typist using Morse code against a 13 year old using mobile texting. The content was a randomly chosen phrase from an advert. The dot ‘n dash guy was faster, even though his message had to be transcribed by yet another veteran receiver.

Deutsche Welle published a curious story the other day about a German supermarket millionaire called Johann Vielberth who is funding a project to develop a new universal communication system called KOD. Like Zamenhof and others before him, Vielberth’s aim is to provide the world with a culturally neutral tongue to foster better – and cheaper – communication than is available through conventional means.

KOD is based on the shared elements of 15 languages spoken by 4.6 billion people: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Hungarian and Yoruba.

The cunning plan is to develop a 40K word vocabulary based on these shared elements that users can then integrate into their own natural structures. Unlike Esperanto, for example, KOD has no unique syntax, only a lexicon. The team has also developed a new script for the language to avoid err…scriptism, but will apparently allow lazy learners to use the Latin alphabet.

Umberto Eco and others have explored the genealogy of universal languages, and their perfect language ideologies. The idea that the prodigality of language is a curse to be overcome rather than the conditio sine quae non for us to experience our being in the world is a tough old bird. After all, we’ve developed skills such as translation to mediate between (rather than overcome) linguistic difference. Vielberth should have put his money into improving translation automation systems, not Deseperanto Mk II.

An outfit called Kợnyin – yes that’s a diacritical under the ‘o’ , not a smudge – has just launched a range of keyboards for Latin-alphabet African languages, marketed by LANCOR, a Nigerian IT company. The keyboard features a QWERTY layout modified to include all diacritical marks for languages used officially in various countries in the continent. Starting with Nigeria, which uses written English, Ẹdo, Ẹ̣fik, Hausa, Fulani, Ìgbo, Kanuri and Yorùba in various contexts. This means that the new keyboard hosts a total of 26 “alphabets”. Kợnyin also markets a US multilingual keyboard with English, Español, and Ōlelo Hawai’I alphabets and diacritical marks. How “official” are the latter two tongues?

Until now, writers in countries such as Nigeria and Niger and Togo and Tanzania have presumably made use of multiple physical keyboards, or virtual onscreen keyboards you click on – like the character insert mode in Word. Or more likely, nothing at all. Multilingual keyboarding has always been a headache for manufacturers: do you offer a deck with all possible character needs for all writers in a language set, knowing most will need few? Or do you localize keyboards to specific typewriting traditions, plus a few international keys such as currencies and the like, losing out on generalities and increasing production overheads for small runs? In other words, do you globalize or localize the keyboard concept? And then do you instantiate this choice in the hardware or the software?

I remember very early efforts to sell Mac Arabization kits with stick-on Arabic characters to be pasted onto European physical keyboards. A mess. Then Xerox pioneered the truly virtual keyboard for multilingual contexts back in the late 1980s, but this meant that keyboarding turned into cursor-ing, with software making the hardware awkward. Presumably this is how virtual keyboards on mobile phones and similar devices work today when you want to input, say, a Turkish “ș” on a little standard alphanumerical keypad.

The thing about keyboards as a text input device is that you can learn and get used to any layout if you work at it, however non-optimal it might be. All I could find once in a North African city 25 years ago to write English text was an old Polish keyboard typewriter, with an ł, ź and ę in the wrong places for UK fingers. But after about a week’s acclimatization, I could churn out English by the yard. I also remember watching a Cuban cop fill out a form at top speed in Spanish using a clunky German layout typewriter from Leipzig. And remember that when the Perseus project of digitizing the whole of the Greek literary canon looked around for input typists, they ended up training a squadron of Filipino women to use an ancient Greek keyboard to do the job. Knowing the meaning of the Greek apparently got in the way of input speed when they tested classics graduates for the job.

The UK text processing company Corpora Software has struck again (see here for a previous posting on their products), this time with Summarize!, a personalized document summary tool. People have been researching automatic document summarization ever since the dawn of computing, but hard facts about its actual usage and effectiveness are rare. A quick précis (nudge, nudge) of any reports on successful experiments would be welcome.

Especially so because document construction and textual presentation style have already adapted to the information overload. Not just as digests and short versions, or by the use of purely graphical methods. Summarizing techniques are systematically used to make it easier to guess the core content of books, articles, and other documents. Non-fiction books now usually carry explanatory subtitles, articles use pull quotes or side-bars and boxes to summarize content, everyone uses lists (the easiest summarizer there is) and bullet points, and abstracting practices from scholarly publications have gone mainstream in executive summaries and the like. Likewise, copy-writers are taught to use an inverted triangle method for press releases – vital need-to-know new content at the top, tapering to often-ignored given information at the bottom. All of which simplifies and accelerates readability and knowledge capture. We’ve come a long way from the world of 9th century monkish manuscripts, where readers had to contnd with rare word division, and in which scribes started top left and ended bottom right with only rare letter coloring to signal discursive shifts.

Two cultural pendants to the short-version mindset. One is Tom Stoppard’s 30 minute versions of Shakespeare’s plays (remember a full length Hamlet can last 4 hours) for the Shakespeare Schools Festival , reported recently here (subscription maybe necessary). A sort of kids’ equivalent to the ecxecutive summary of long reports. The other is Eric Schulman’s famous The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less .