I just recently pointed my nooscope at places outside the U.S. and
was quite amused to see arabic letters in the tile maps around Tunis...
http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/82500/Tunis
Looking around a bit more I find Japanese writing w/ Romanized text
around Tokyo
http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/75666/Museum_of_Contemporary_Art_Tokyo
I appreciate that the people "on the ground" who make the map are
going to be people who are located in an area, and are going to know
the local language, but people who want to explore faraway places could
have a hard time with the rendering that I'm seeing -- are there are
roman-alphabet tilemaps around anywhere?
Cultural imperialist or not, my suspicion that that the roman
alphabet is (at least somewhat) understood by educated people who use
non-roman alphabets regularly (this is definitely the case in the CJK
area.) On the other hand, my guess is that the ability to read Arabic
is as common in, say Korea, as it is in the U.S.
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