Alphabets work best with the languages for which they were invented.
Most countries ban names spelled in foreign alphabets, and many restrict the use of foreign diacritical marks: that fuels a row between Lithuania and Poland.
But perhaps it could be between romanicised alphabets and Chinese characters?
Pure, a typeface created for Nokia, works in 21 alphabets including Tamil, Gurmukhi and in an April fool's joke last year Klingon.
For untranslatable names, transliteration and transcription (yes, there is a difference) between languages and alphabets inevitably creates unauthorised variants.
Its curved exterior walls of grey granite etched with runes, hieroglyphs, ideograms and letters from a dozen alphabets—hint at both the building blocks of human knowledge and at the unearthing of ancient civilisations.Perched along Alexandria's seaside Corniche, the library is indeed striking.
By any token, we are merely a string of numbers plus alphabets, and slowly but surely, will be enslaved by the mind-boggling complexity of technology.
Ms Anker, for example, recreates chromosomes in sculpture and on canvas, in order, she says, to look at relationships between the body in flesh, its genetic code and primitive alphabets.
Yet it remains popular not only in countries that use Latin-based languages, such as America, Britain and most of Europe, but also in China, Japan and most of Asia, where written languages often have much larger alphabets.
As in the West, predictive software can help speed things up by identifying characters or even entire phrases from the user's initial input and the context of the subject matter.In Japan several different alphabets are used depending on the context.
Kana is, itself, composed of two alphabets called hiragana and katakana.
