Braille

Isn't that a representation of latin text in Braille form?

Non-Latin?

OK, but what about Braille?

Let them eat cake (and learn english)

"People who are complaining don't realise that the majority of the planet do not understand latin characters. Not only is 'google.com' meaningless, it is illegible."

Not true. The majority of the planet speaks English if you take into account that English is virtually the universal first choice of second language (and hence latin alphabet). There are more English speakers in India and China than in USA, UK, Canada, Australia (etc) combined. I've seen road signs in Russia and Japan (and wales) with Latinised versions of the local wording and many Russians will write "russian" on a latin keyboard using widely understood latinisations.

To find those for whom English and latin script are totally alien you need to go to remote rural areas, subsistence farmers, groups for whom getting enough to eat is higher priority than getting a localised domain name (or even electricity ).

English is the international language of business, air and sea navigation and the educated members of society.

And IT and the internet. I recently tripped over trying to convert a website to Russian. My text editor handled the script OK but it failed on global (all files) replace of "home" with ГЛАВНАЯ. Then I hit the problem of PHP handling of Cyrillic.

It's time we in UK stopped beating ourselves up about how terrible it is that when a foreign businessman comes here he speaks English but when a Brit businessman goes abroad he needs a translator so we need to improve language teaching in schools. Wrong.

In non-English speaking countries the choice of second language is obvious, that which will be of most use: English.

What's of most use to us? On the basis of global usage as a first language the contenders are Chinese and Spanish. But no, our real language skilll is that we can understand foreigners' slaughtered english - I can understand the Indian call center (usually).

Sometimes I can even understand a few words of Glaswegian (usually of the 4 letter variety).

On the other hand when I've attempted to speak a foreign language the natives seem unable to understand - because I said "le table" which is of course complete nonsense, it should be "la table" (or is it the other way round?) - the French seem unable to let that pass, at best they will correct me (whereas a Brit would rarely correct their "ze table" to "the table").

Language is how we communicate. When I was 8 I was the only one in my school who'd been outside UK, few Brits had much need to know a foreign language. Now I can sit here and communicate instantly around the globe, and for that to be effective we need a common language. Minority Languages are dying out for good reason, keep them on life-support as museum pieces if you like but don't expect anyone else to make allowances for them.

BTW - My proposal is that the EC should adopt an official language and put an end to the "tower of babel", the waste of translating all EC communication into 27(?) languages. I wonder which language they would agree on...