English In Greek
I've lately stumbled upon a fun use of pre-unicode font sets. You can transliterate your UI into another script! Now, this isn't practical for use for most kinds of transliteration. For instance, I can't read anything in my UI when it's in Runic fonts (though I hear there are those who can). But since our Latin alphabet is derived from Greek, it's pretty easy!
In the desktop screen, I had my coding terminal minimized; I can't yet code in Greek (yeah, I know.. lus3r). But, soon! After only a couple of days, chats have become pretty easy, and maybe by the end of the week I'll be able to.
There's also some transliteration problems. Though alphanumerics work pretty well, most special symbols don't (e.g. URLs have pipes instead of forward slashes, end-of-sentence ? or ! modifies the last letter with a diacritical mark instead of just printing, and there's no J in Greek!). So, I'm looking into making my own TrueType font for this purpose. UPDATE: Click on the screenshot of New Greeklish Font. The font is based off of Luxi Sans, using Greek characters where possible to substitute for Latin alphabet characters.
Next up: Phoenician! Why? Well, the reason Greek is such an effective script for English is that our (this) alphabet, the Roman or Latin alphabet, was derived from the Greek alphabet around 700-900 B.C.. Well, Greek itself was derived from Phoenician (maybe through an inter-script called Linear A/B?). If you have a decent unicode font installed, you can see the correspondence here. Now, nobody really uses Phoenician these days, but it turns out just about all alphabets are derived from Phoenician. So, maybe this is a way I can (finally) learn another language! If I pick up Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic (both derived from Phoenician) oughta be a snap, right? :)