2549: Timor-Leste Dec 5, 2021

Plenty of regions, and even countries, are named with cardinal directions in their name, like South Sudan or Republic of Northern Macedonia. This is also true in the name of the country, Timor-Leste, though in English this is sometimes 'East Timor'. 'Leste' is 'east' in Portuguese, owing to its Portuguese colonial history, but anglicizing to 'East Timor' only does half the job, because 'timor' means 'east' in the native language of Tetum. Literally therefore its name means 'East-East'. On the other half of the island, now shared with Indonesia, used to be Dutch Timor, now known as 'West Timor', or translated as 'West East'.

2105: Brahmic Abugidas Sep 19, 2020

Any writing system that takes certain shortcuts so to speak such as not including vowels, or including an inherent vowel (as with an abugida) will run into certain problems. Brahmic abugidas such as those used to write Hindi or Bengali use letters which represent a consonant with an attached vowel (usually /a/). A problem then arises when either there is a different vowel or no vowel (both solved with a diacritic), or when there is a cluster of consonants, as this is not treated uniformly; for instance there is a special mark in these systems to indicate the inclusion of /r/. This is further complicated given that all of these systems can combine at least 2 and up to 4 letters into more complex ligatures (i.e. joined together). These systems are used from over India and across much of Southeast Asia, and have even had a significant presence in Japan.

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