November 5, 2004
Ancient Tongue SMS
Wired reports that one of the world's oldest living alphabets could be about to make its debut on a mobile phone, if a group of Ethiopian academics gets its way.
"Professors and research students here in the Ethiopian capital have just released a piece of groundbreaking research that they hope will open the door to SMS messaging in Ethiopic characters.
The earliest use of Ethiopic lettering has been traced to before the fourth century. Today the letters are shared by a range of languages spoken by millions of people across the Horn of Africa and hundreds of thousands of emigrants settled in the United States, Canada and parts of Europe.
The new report, catchily titled "Ethiopic Keyboard Mapping and Predictive Text Inputting Algorithm in a Wireless Environment," sets out to overcome some of the substantial technical obstacles to the alphabet's transition to the mobile age. "
"There are so many people in Ethiopia who cannot write English. A localized version of SMS would open up the technology to the whole population."
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