Wasting tax dollars: govt pays to enable web surfing in Egyptian hieroglyphs

The National Endowment for the Humanities is a US government organization.

I've always felt there was something missing in my life...you know a non-specific kind of void...the kind of thing that just leaves you uneasy and feeling unfulfilled. Now I know what that void is -- I've been unable to surf using Egyptian hieroglyphs as my native text.

UC Berkeley

New research awards just announced will enable the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) at the University of California, Berkeley, to continue for the next two years its pioneering work to allow users of the native scripts for all writing systems - from ancient hieroglyphs to Hungarian Runic to Aramaic and more - to use the Internet.

With nearly $300,000 worth of new funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Google, the four-year-old initiative will concentrate on encoding eight scripts in 2007 and a like number in 2008.

Modern scripts slated for Internet encoding include Javanese and additions for Native American languages such as Naskapi, Blackfoot and Cree. Historical scripts earmarked for work include Mandaic, the liturgical language of the Mandean religion; and Tangut, the script of an extinct Sino-Tibetan language formerly spoken in northwestern China...