Learning your (foreign) ABCs on the computer

After nearly 30 years of personal computing, we are still not at a point where we can easily handle all or most of the world's languages. The Unicode consortium has done a lot but like most standards organisations, it moves extremely slowly. Many people are aware of the double-byte problems that languages such as Chinese and Japanese must deal with, but even languages that use alphabets can have a set of problems we may not have been aware of. Take this week's question:

I want to study the classical Indian language Sanskrit, but I am a little lost about how to go about using a computer to do this.

I have access to both a Mac and a PC but I am more familiar with the PC. Do I have to do a lot to accomplish this or is much of this built into the operating systems? What about word processing? Would I need to get something special?

Name and address supplied

Sai Kung

The alphabet you are looking for is called Devanagari. It is used for Sanskrit as well as Hindi and many other modern Indian languages. My advice would be to write it out for a while until you have learnt the alphabet by heart. Only after that, would I consider using the computer.

There are many things about writing Sanskrit that you will need to deal with. Although the alphabet is fairly straightforward, there are a number of issues.