Geek of All Trades: More on nifty international typefaces

Indian film

FILMI GEEK
Geek of all Trades takes on Hindi film at Filmi Geek - reviews and recommendations for newcomers and seasoned filmi-heads alike. Please stop by, read the reviews, tell me what you think.
Sounds Like Power
Filmi Geek's blog and fan site devoted to Indian actress and activist Shabana Azmi

Some African Music

Various Artists: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto
An excellent collection of Township Jive tunes.
Juluka: Johnny Clegg & Juluka collection
My favorite Juluka record, Ubuhle Bemvelo - their magnificent collection of rocked up Zulu folk songs - is out of print and hard to find. This collection will have to do.
Angelique Kidjo: Oremi
Funky Afro-pop. "Itche Koutche" is the best tune ever.
West Nkosi: 16 original sax jive hits
West Nkosi's infectious grooves are Township Jive at its finest.
Various Artists: Guitar Paradise of East Africa
A sparkling collection of bands from Kenya, Zaire, and Tanzania playing in the Jit and Benga styles.
Miriam Makeba: World of Miriam Makeba
The Grand Dame of African music in the United States, Miriam Makeba is perhaps better known here as a politically active folk singer than as an early pioneer of Afro-pop and township jazz.
Oumou Sangare: Oumou
Impressive Malian singer and songwriter.
Tinariwen: Amassakoul
More music from Mali. This band is of the Sarahan Touareg tribe. They are idolized as guitar gods in Mali and lay down a hypnotizing groove.

June 22, 2005

More on nifty international typefaces

In a recent post I mentioned the use of UTF-8 encoding for computer displays of non-Roman alphabets like Devanagari. There, I included links to a blog in Hindi and the BBC-Hindi page.

In that vein, I recently came across a blog in Arabic. (The log-in page of my bloghost includes a list of "recently-updated blogs" that offers an interesting and random window into the blogosphere.) I think the fact that UTF-8 can handle right-to-left writing systems as well as left-to-right systems is pretty impressive.

If you, like me, enjoy seeing text displayed in a few of the great variety of scripts that humans have devised, the "What is Unicode?" page is a good place to start - it has links down the left-hand side of the page to the same text in dozens of the world's languages, including those using right-to-left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew, beautiful and odd (to my American eye) scripts like Thai and Georgian, and of course, my beloved Hindi. Unicode can even handle complex, non-alphabetic and non-syllabic scripts like Chinese.

June 22, 2005 in Geek of Language, Geek of Technology, Geek of the Internet | Permalink

The comments to this entry are closed.